--,    I 

mm 


t.  BT.  HCHEMBACH- 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


FROM  THE  LIBRARY  OF 
FRANK  J.  KLINGBERG 


'  A/i  Love  I  could  you  and  I  with  Him  conspire 
To  grasp  this  sorry  Scheme  of  Things  entire, 
Would  we  not  sJiatter  it  to  bits — and  (Jien 
Remould  it  nearer  to  the  Hearfs  Desire!" 

OMAR  KHAYYAM 


THE 


BY 


JUSTIN  H.  MCCARTHY,  M.P. 

AUTHOR     OF     "AN     OUTLINE     OF     IRISH     HISTORY" 
14  ENGLAND    UNDER    GLADSTONE  "    ETC. 


IN  TWO  VOLUMES 

VOL.  L 


NEW   YORK 

HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  FRANKLIN  SQUARE 
1890 


TO   MY    FATHER 


I   DEDICATE   THIS   BOOK 


CONTENTS  OF  YOL.  I. 


I.  WHENCE  ? 1 

II.  SEEDS  OP  REVOLUTION 14 

III.  Louis  THE  WELL-BELOVED 26 

IV.  THE  PHILOSOPHES 39 

V.  THE  APOSTLE  OP  AFFLICTION 67 

VI.  THE  POMPADOUR 92 

VII.  "How  WILL  BERRY  PULL  THROUGH?"  ....  104 

VIII.  A  QUEER  WORLD 116 

IX.  MARIE  ANTOINETTE 132 

X.  TRIANON 141 

XI.  TURGOT 166 

XII.  THE  DIAMOND  NECKLACE 186 

"illl.  COUNT  CAGLIOSTRO 197 

XIV.  KNAVES  AND  FOOLS 214 

XV.  SOWING  THE  WIND 226 

XVI.  THE  NOTABLES 239 

XVII.  THE  BRIENNE  ILIAD 251 

XVIII.  EQUALITY  ORLEANS 262 

XIX.  BRIENNE  is  BLOWN  OUT 274 

XX.  WHAT  ARTHUR  YOUNG  SAW  . 293 

XXI.  WHAT  ARTHUK  YOUNG  SAID 319 

XXII.  PARIS 332 

XXIII.  THE  PEOPLE  OF  PARIS 364 

XXIV.  THE  ELECTIONS  .  ...  .387 


viii  CONTENTS. 

OUAPTKR  PAGE 

XXV.  THE  SPRING  OP  '89    .     .        398 

XXVI.  THE  Row  AT  REVEILLON'S 404 

XXVII.  STATES-GENERAL  AT  LAST 414 

XXVIII.  THE  PLAY  BEGINS 419 

XXIX.  THE  WILD  GABRIEL  HONORE 425 

XXX.  THE  MAN  FROM  ARRAS 464 

XXXI.  SOME  MINOR  CHARACTERS 482 

XXXII.  PEOPLE  IN  THE  STREETS  ........  494 

XXXIII.  THE  OVERTURE  ENDS ,    .  50? 

XXXIV.  THE  EIGHT  WEEKS ,     .  510 

XXXV.  SLOW  AND  SURE „     ,    .  531 

XXXVI.  ON  AND  ON 539 

XXXVII.  DRIFTING .  549 

XXXVIII.  THE  TENTH  OP  JUNE 557 

XXXIX.  THE  SEVENTEENTH  OP  JUNE 563 

XL.  TENNIS 571 

XLI.  PARIS  AND  VERSAILLES 592 

XL1I.  CAMILLE  DESMOULINS 605 

XLIII.  TWELFTH  AND  THIRTEENTH  OF  JULY.     .     .     .  612 

XLIV.  THE  BASTILLE 623 

XLV.  AFTERMATH G52 

XLVI.  THE  STONES  OF  THE  BASTILLE  .  .  660 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION. 


CHAPTER   I. 

WHENCE  ? 

LORD  BEACONSFIELD,  to  whom  life  was  all  paradox, 
was  never  more  delightfully  paradoxical  than  when  he 
declared  that  there  were  only  two  events  in  history — 
the  Siege  of  Troy  and  the  French  Revolution.  Like 
most  of  Lord  Beaconsfield's  brilliant  firework  phrases, 
the  shining  fantasy  was  more  than  half  a  truth.  In 
the  antique  world — that  antique  world  which,  in  spite 
of  Mr.  Freeman,  does  seem  to  be  set  apart  from  us  by 
so  definite  and  so  insuperable  a  barrier  —  no  event  is 
more  conspicuous  than  the  story  of  the  armament  of 
Hellenic  chieftains  and  Princes  Orgulous  against  a  little 
town  in  Asia  Minor.  In  comparison  with  that  mythical 
or  semi-mythical  event  the  conquests  of  Alexander,  the 
career  of  Caesar,  the  very  fall  of  Rome  herself,  appear 
to  dwindle  into  insignificance.  In  much  the  same  way 
the  French  Revolution  seems  to  dwarf  all  modern  his- 
tory ;  its  heroes  good  or  bad,  its  shining  St.  Michaels 
and  Lucifers,  Stars  of  the  Morning,  dwarf  other  heroes 
of  other  times  to  the  proportions  of  pigmies.  The 
French  Revolution  shares  with  the  Siege  of  Troy  its 
legendary  attributes  ;  shares  with  it,  too,  the  perennial 
charm  which  makes  men  turn  like  lovers  to  its  story 
again  and  again  with  unabated  interest  and  unflagging 
I.— 1 


2  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  I. 

zeal.  Even  the  Homeric  Scholiasts  are  not  more  enam- 
oured of  their  theme  than  the  historians  who  once  em- 
bark on  the  perilous  seas  of  French  revolutionary  history. 

The  heroic  muse,  suddenly  called  upon,  in  the  Homeric 
formula,  to  sing  of  the  French  Revolution,  might  very 
well  be  puzzled  where  to  make  a  beginning.  It  is  really 
hard  to  decide  exactly  how  far  back  we  must  hark  to 
get  to  its  legitimate  starting-point.  Are  we  to  seek  the 
initial  impetus  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.,  or  in  the  de- 
baucheries of  the  Regency,  or  in  the  spacious  despotism 
of  Louis  XIV.,  or  yet  farther  back  in  the  feuds  of  the 
Fronde  and  Mazarin,  when  a  queen  and  a  dauphin  fled 
from  Paris  and  a  Paris  mob  ?  It  is  difficult  to  draw 
the  hard-and-fast  line,  and  the  conscientious  historian 
reaching  backwards  into  history  might  find  himself 
well  among  the  early  Capets,  among  the  Merovingians, 
among  the  enemies  of  Caesar,  and  still  come  on  traces 
of  the  causes  of  the  French  Revolution.  To  be  plain, 
the  history  of  the  French  Revolution  is  scarcely  com- 
prehensible without  a  knowledge  of  the  history  of 
France;  the  history  of  France  in  its  turn  is  scarcely 
comprehensible  without  that  of  Rome,  of  Greece,  and 
so  backwards  to  the  dawn  of  deeds.  But  a  history  of 
the  world  would  be  a  lengthy  preface  for  a  chronicle  of 
the  French  Revolution,  and  each  chronicler  must  choose 
his  own  starting-point,  and  toe  his  own  line. 

Still,  the  great  difficulty  in  approaching  the  study  of 
the  French  Revolution  is  to  choose  this  starting-point. 
In  one  sense,  in  what  may  be  called  a  dramatic  sense,  it 
may  be  conveniently  assumed  that  the  revolutionary 
egg  was  hatching  while  Louis  the  Well -beloved  was 
cynically  speculating  on  deluges;  the  shell  chipped,  and 
the  cock  began  to  crow  when  Louis  XVI.  began  to  try 
to  reign.  Yet  again,  the  Revolution  may  be  said  to 


1789.  SEEKING  THE  SOURCE.  3 

have  begun  with  the  self-creation  of  the  National  As- 
sembly ;  in  another  regard,  the  origin  of  the  Revolution 
must  be  placed  much  farther  back.  Indeed,  it  is  curious 
to  find  how  far  back  we  shall  have  to  travel  when  once 
we  leave  the  arbitrary  line  which  divides  the  Old  Order 
from  the  New.  The  Revolution  began,  one  authority 
may  argue,  with  the  struggle  of  the  Parliaments  against 
Louis  XV.  It  began,  according  to  another,  with  the 
great  movement  of  literature  and  thought  which  evolved 
the  Encyclopaedia  and  the  Social  Contract.  Another 
will  anticipate  the  scepticism  of  the  eighteenth  century 
by  the  scepticism  of  Montaigne,  of  Bayle,  and  of  Fon- 
tenelle,  will  see  in  the  Encyclopaedia  and  the  Social  Con- 
tract not  causes,  but  effects,  and  will  leap  back  lightly  to 
Althusen,  and  Hobbes,  and  Locke,  and  Genevese  deism, 
not  without  an  eye,  it  may  be,  to  the  thoughts  and  theo- 
ries of  far  Hellenic  philosophies.  Another  dates  its  im- 
mediate conception  from  the  moment  when  Benjamin 
Franklin  amazed  the  ladies  of  Versailles  with  the  sombre 
habit  of  the  Pennsylvanian  Quaker,  and  when  Lafayette 
lent  his  bright  sword  to  the  service  of  Washington  and 
the  young  Republic.  Another  may  insist  upon  a  sum- 
mary of  the  various  forces,  accidents,  deliberate  lines  of 
policy,  which,  from  the  breaking  up  of  the  great  fiefs 
down  to  the  death  of  Louis  XIV.,  had  prepared  the  dis- 
tractions of  the  monarchy  under  Louis's  descendants,  or 
may  ask,  more  moderately,  for  a  chronicle  of  the  strife 
of  ecclesiastical  factions  and  the  battles  between  the 
judiciary  and  the  crown.  It  is  the  old  philosophic 
business  of  causation  over  again.  Trace  any  single  event 
back  step  by  step,  and  you  will  find  the  event  of  yes- 
terday intimately  and  indissolubly  connected  with  the 
creation  of  the  world.  Any  starting-point  for  any  his- 
torical event  whatever  must  be  more  or  less  arbitrary. 


4  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  I. 

It  may  be  convenient  to  take  the  year  1789  as  the  initial 
Year  of  Revolution ;  that  is  the  year  in  which  the  Rev- 
olution, however  distant  its  remote  causes,  actually  did 
begin  to  be.  But  it  is  surely  necessary  to  give  such  a 
sketch  of  the  preceding  history  and  condition  of  France 
as  may  be  essential  to  the  true  understanding  of  the 
story. 

For  it  seems  impossible  to  appreciate  the  events  of 
the  French  Revolution  without  a  clear  understanding 
of  many  of  the  events  which  immediately  preceded  it, 
and  most  of  the  social  conditions  which  made  revolution 
not  only  possible  or  probable,  but  imperative  and  inev- 
itable. The  volcanic  character  of  the  French  Revolution 
is  made  the  more  impressive  by  contrast  with  the  tra- 
ditional conservatism  of  the  Old  Order  which  preceded 
it;  just  as  the  ruin  caused  by  a  landslip,  an  earthquake, 
or  a  tidal  wave  is  most  impressive  to  one  whose  eyes 
have  long  been  familiar  with  the  smiling  fields,  the  state- 
ly town,  the  teeming  coast  which  have  been  suddenly 
laid  desolate.  Moreover,  the  genius  of  Revolution  did 
not  leap,  fully  armed,  out  of  the  Jupiter  brain  of  the 
National  Assembly.  As  the  meteorologist  can  detect 
the  warnings  of  the  coming  storm,  so  the  student  of  his- 
tory can  note,  for  much  more  than  a  generation  before 
the  summons  to  the  States- General,  the  slow,  steady 
growth  of  the  Revolutionary  Idea.  That  the  Revolution 
should  have  taken  France  by  surprise  is  in  itself  surpris- 
ing. Revolution  was  in  the  air  for  long  enough,  had 
been  thought  of,  talked  of,  written  about,  breathed 
abroad  in  a  hundred  ways.  It  was  very  much  as  if  the 
dwellers  on  the  slopes  of  Vesuvius,  noting  the  sullen 
smoke-cap  on  the  peak,  noting  the  trouble  of  earth  and 
air  and  sea  and  sky,  and  talking  daily  of  the  eruption 
that  threatened,  should  be  taken  completely  by  surprise, 


1788.  A  PIECE  OF  FICTION.  5 

when  at  last  the  lava  did  begin  to  brim  the  lips  of  the 
crater. 

There  is,  indeed,  no  better  preface  from  a  purely  lit- 
erary, or,  shall  we  say,  from  a  purely  dramatic  point  of 
view,  to  the  French  Revolution  than  that  wonderful 
posthumous  piece  of  fiction  which  La  Harpe  wrote 
under  the  guise  of  fact,  and  on  which  Sainte-Beuve 
rightly  bases  La  Harpe's  claim  to  remembrance.  Taine 
places  it  at  the  end  of  his  study  of  the  Old  Order;  it 
might  more  appropriately  begin  a  record  of  the  French 
Revolution.  Let  "the  first  lieutenant  of  Voltaire" 
speak  for  himself. 

"  It  seems  to  me,"  he  says,  "  as  if  it  were  but  yester- 
day, and  yet  it  was  at  the  beginning  of  the  year  1788. 
We  were  dining  with  one  of  our  brethren  of  the  Acad- 
emy, a  grand  seignior  and  a  man  of  intelligence.  The 
company  was  numerous  and  of  every  profession — cour- 
tiers, men  of  the  robe,  men  of  letters,  and  academicians; 
all  had  feasted  luxuriously,  according  to  custom.  At 
the  dessert  the  wines  of  Malvoisie  and  of  Constance  con- 
tributed to  the  social  gayety  a  sort  of  freedom  not  al- 
ways kept  within  decorous  limits.  At  that  time  society 
had  reached  the  point  at  which  everything  is  permitted 
that  excites  laughter.  Champfort  had  read  to  us  his 
impious  and  libertine  stories,  and  great  ladies  had  lis- 
tened to  these  without  recourse  to  their  fans.  Hence  a 
deluge  of  witticisms  against  religion,  one  quoting  a 
tirade  from  'La  Pucelle,'  another  bringing  forward  cer- 
tain philosophical  stanzas  by  Diderot.  There  was  un- 
bounded applause.  The  conversation  becomes  more 
serious;  admiration  is  expressed  at  the  revolution  ac- 
complished by  Voltaire,  and  all  agree  in  its  being  the 
first  title  to  his  fame.  '  He  gave  the  tone  to  his  century, 
finding  readers  in  the  antechambers  as  well  as  in  the 


6  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  I. 

drawing-room.'  One  of  the  guests  narrated,  bursting 
with  laughter,  what  a  hairdresser  said  to  him  while 
powdering  his  hair  :  '  You  see,  sir,  although  I  am  but  a 
poor  devil,  I  have  no  more  religion  than  any  one  else.' 
They  concluded  that  the  Revolution  would  soon  be  con- 
summated, that  superstition  and  fanaticism  must  wholly 
give  way  to  philosophy,  and  they  thus  calculated  the 
probabilities  of  the  epoch  and  those  of  the  future  society 
which  should  see  the  reign  of  reason.  The  most  aged 
lamented  not  being  able  to  flatter  themselves  that  they 
could  see  it ;  the  young  rejoiced  in  a  reasonable  prospect 
of  seeing  it,  and  every  one  especially  congratulated  the 
Academy  on  having  paved  the  way  for  the  great  work, 
and  on  having  been  the  headquarters,  the  centre,  the 
inspirer  of  freedom  of  thought. 

"  One  of  the  guests  had  taken  no  part  in  this  gay  con- 
versation. This  was  Gazette,  an  amiable  and  original 
man,  but,  unfortunately,  infatuated  with  the  reveries  of 
the  Illuminati.  In  the  most  serious  tone  he  now  began: 
'Gentlemen,'  said  he,  'be  content;  you  will  witness  this 
great  revolution  that  you  so  much  desire.  You  know 
that  I  am  something  of  a  prophet,  and  I  repeat  it,  you 
will  witness  it.  Do  you  know  what  will  be  the  result 
of  this  revolution,  for  all  of  you,  so  long  as  you  remain 
here?'  'Ah!'  exclaimed  Condorcet,  with  his  shrewd, 
simple  air  and  smile,  'let  us  see,  a  philosopher  is  not 
sorry  to  encounter  a  prophet.'  '  You,  Monsieur  de  Con- 
dorcet, will  expire  stretched  on  the  floor  of  a  dungeon ; 
you  will  die  of  the  poison  you  take  to  escape  the  execu- 
tioner, of  the  poison  which  the  felicity  of  that  era  will 
compel  you  always  to  carry  about  your  person  !'  At 
first,  great  astonishment  was  manifested,  and  then  came 
an  outburst  of  laughter.  '  What  has  all  this  in  common 
with  philosophy  and  the  reign  of  reason?'  'Precisely 


1788.  CAZOTTE'S  PROPHECY.  7 

what  I  have  just  remarked  to  you ;  in  the  name  of  phi- 
losophy, of  humanity,  of  freedom,  under  the  reign  of 
reason,  you  will  thus  reach  your  end ;  and,  truly,  it  will 
be  the  reign  of  reason,  for  there  will  be  temples  of 
reason,  and,  in  those  days,  in  all  France,  the  temples  will 
be  those  alone  of  reason.  You,  Monsieur  de  Champfort, 
you  will  sever  your  veins  with  twenty-two  strokes  of  a 
razor,  and  yet  you  will  not  die  for  months  afterwards. 
You,  Monsieur  Vicq-d'Azir,  you  will  not  open  your  own 
veins,  but  you  will  have  them  opened  six  times  in  one 
day,  in  the  agonies  of  gout,  so  as  to  be  more  certain  of 
success,  and  you  will  die  that  night.  You,  Monsieur 
de  Nicolai,  on  the  scaffold  ;  you,  Monsieur  Bailly,  on  the 
scaffold ;  you,  Monsieur  de  Malesherbes,  on  the  scaffold; 
you,  Monsieur  Roucher,  also  on  the  scaffold.'  'But 
then  we  shall  have  been  overcome  by  Turks  and  Tar- 
tars ?'  '  By  no  means ;  you  will  be  governed,  as  I  have 
already  told  you,  solely  by  philosophy  and  reason. 
Those  who  are  to  treat  you  in  this  manner  will  all  be 
philosophers,  will  all,  at  every  moment,  have  on  their 
lips  the  phrases  you  have  uttered  within  the  hour,  will 
repeat  your  maxims,  will  quote  like  yourselves  the 
verses  of  Diderot  and  of  "La  Pucelle."'  'And  when 
will  all  this  happen  ?'  '  Six  years  will  not  pass  before 
what  I  tell  you  will  be  accomplished.'  '  Well,  these  are 
miracles,'  exclaims  La  Harpe,  'and  you  leave  me  out?' 
'  You  will  be  no  less  a  miracle,  for  you  will  then  be  a 
Christian.'  'Ah,'  interposed  Champfort,  'I  breathe 
again ;  if  we  are  to  die  only  when  La  Harpe  becomes 
a  Christian,  we  are  immortals.'  '  Come,  at  least  we 
women,'  said  the  Duchesse  de  Gramont,  '  are  extremely 
fortunate  in  being  of  no  consequence  in  revolutions.  It 
is  understood  that  we  are  not  to  blame,  and  our  sex — ' 
'Your  sex,  ladies,  will  not  protect  you  this  time.  You 


8  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  I. 

will  be  treated  precisely  as  men,  with  no  difference 
whatever.  You,  Madame  la  Duchesse,  will  be  led  to 
the  scaffold,  you  and  many  ladies  besides  yourself,  in  a 
cart  with  your  hands  tied  behind  your  back.'  'Ah,  in 
that  event,  I  hope  to  have  at  least  a  carriage  covered 
with  black.'  '  No,  madame,  greater  ladies  than  yourself 
will  go,  like  yourself,  in  a  cart,  and  with  their  hands 
tied  like  yours.'  'Greater  ladies  !  What,  princesses  of 
the  blood  !'  '  Still  greater  ladies  than  those  !'  They 
began  to  think  the  jest  was  carried  too  far.  Madame 
de  Gramont,  to  dispel  the  gloom,  did  not  insist  on  a 
reply  to  her  last  exclamation,  and  contented  herself 
by  saying,  in  the  lightest  tone,  'Now,  he  will  not  even 
leave  me  a  confessor!'  'No, madame,  neither  you  nor 
any  other  person  will  be  allowed  a  confessor ;  the  last 
of  the  condemned  that  will  have  one,  as  an  act  of  grace, 
will  be — '  He  stopped  a  moment.  '  Tell  me,  now,  who 
is  the  fortunate  mortal  enjoying  this  prerogative  ?'  '  It 
is  the  last  that  will  remain  to  him,  and  it  will  be  the 
King  of  France.' " 

How  much  would  one  not  give  that  that  grim  fancy 
were  very  fact  ?  Can  we  not  see  the  brilliant  room, 
shining  with  waxen  lights,  the  assembly  of  wits  and 
poets  and  philosophers  and  fair  pedantic  women,  hear 
the  ripple  of  light  conversation  suddenly  shattered  and 
startled  by  the  astonishing  suggestions  of  Cazotte?  We 
can  picture  to  ourselves  Cazotte  himself  surveying  his 
amazed  audience  with  that  curious  face  of  his,  the  face 
that  recalls  in  something  our  own  Oliver  Goldsmith, 
the  face  in  which  a  superhuman  mysticism  reigns  in  the 
high  forehead  and  the  wide  eyes,  and  a  human  sensuali- 
ty of  a  sweet  and  simple  type  asserts  itself  in  the  large 
heavy  jaw,  and  the  large  uncertain  lips.  If  La  Harpe's 
wild  dream  were  true,  if  the  author  of  the  "  Impassioned 


1788.  THE  STARRY  SALONS.  9 

Devil "  and  the  disciple  of  the  Illuminati  had  made  his 
astonishing  prediction,  we  may  well  believe  that  it  would 
have  been  received  with  incredulity  and  amusement. 
Well  might  the  scholars  and  statesmen  who  listened 
smile  confident  in  the  coming  triumph  of  advanced 
ideas,  in  the  Reign  of  Reason,  in  the  regeneration  of  the 
Age  of  Saturn.  How  could  they  possibly  credit  a 
prophet  who  spoke  of  such  unlikely  horrors  to  the 
children  of  the  Encyclopedia,  to  the  pupils  of  Rousseau, 
to  the  economists  who  invested  the  name  of  Turgot  with 
a  kind  of  sanctity?  There  is  really  nothing  in  literature 
more  directly  tragic  than  this  queer  tale  of  La  Harpe's, 
and  it  may  well  be  accepted  by  the  lovers  of  the  pict- 
uresque in  history — and  history  is  far  more  picturesque 
than  some  historians  would  allow — as  a  fitting  prelude 
to  the  story  of  the  French  Revolution. 

The  picturesque  fancy  may  be  pardoned  or  excused 
when  we  remember  that  the  French  Revolution,  accord- 
ing to  the  semi-satiric  suggestion  of  that  curious  dual 
historic  entity,  the  brothers  Goncourt,  began  in  the  sa- 
lons of  Paris.  The  saying,  like  all  such  epigrammatic 
condensations  of  history,  is  neither  accurate  nor  com- 
plete, but  it  contains  a  large  measure  of  truth.  Those 
brilliant  assemblies,  little  local  heavens  starred  with 
bright  names  grouped  in  constellations  of  thought,  of 
theory,  that  drifted  slowly,  steadily,  from  the  suppers 
of  the  Regency  to  the  "  principles  of  eighty-nine."  As 
the  salons  grew  in  influence,  they  grew  in  gravity  ;  as 
the  pebble  of  speculation  or  dogma  cast  into  the  waters 
of  public  opinion  caused  a  wider  and  ever-widening  cir- 
cle, those  who  stood  upon  the  brink  began  to  regard 
their  pastime  with  an  austerer  earnestness.  A  Galiani 
bewailing  Paris  in  his  Italian  exile  more  bitterly  than 
Ovid  in  Pontus  bewailed  Augustan  Rome,  would  hardly 


10  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  I. 

have  recognized,  could  he  have  revisited  it,  the  Paris  of 
his  light  triumphs,  in  the  serious  salons  of  the  years  just 
before  the  Revolution  declared  itself.  The  reign  of 
mere  wit  had  withered,  the  audacities  of  a  new  philoso- 
phy, eager  to  test  with  a  crude  science  all  the  things  of 
earth  or  heaven,  no  longer  afforded  a  unique  delight ; 
the  dreams  of  Rousseau,  the  doctrines  of  the  Encyclo- 
paedists, had  borne  their  fruit,  and  the  dainty  world  was 
dipped  in  a  delirium  of  political  reform,  of  speculations 
as  to  the  rights  of  man  and  the  manufacture  of  consti- 
tutions in  the  Sieyes  manner. 

But  if  there  is  a  difficulty  in  choosing  a  starting-point, 
there  is  scarcely  less  difficulty  in  deciding  the  treatment. 
There  are  two  distinct  and  independent  schools  of  his- 
torians of  the  French  Revolution.  One  of  these  schools, 
of  which  M.  Charles  d'Hericault  is  perhaps  the  most 
characteristic  exponent,  regards  the  Revolution  as  the 
sheer  outpouring  of  the  Pit,  and  always  accords  it  the 
honor  of  capital  lettering,  as  a  kind  of  tribute  to  its  Sa- 
tanic grandeur.  The  leaders,  in  its  eyes,  are  as  so  many 
fiends  in  human  shape,  specially  sent  into  the  world  for 
the  purpose  of  harassing  a  noble  king  and  yet  more 
noble  queen,  and  a  nobility  whose  resplendent  merits 
make  them  only  a  little  lower  than  the  archangels. 
"The  Revolution,"  says  M.  Charles  d'Hericault  with 
all  gravity,  "is  the  reign  of  Satan.  God  has  given  the 
evil  angels,  for  a  period  which  we  cannot  predict,  power 
over  the  kingdom  of  France ;"  and  he  goes  on  in  this 
vein  in  a  kind  of  breathless  way,  dealing  largely  in 
"demons,"  "monsters,"  and  "madmen,"  as  the  only 
epithets  proper  to  apply  to  any  and  every  Revolution- 
ist. On  the  other  hand,  however,  the  very  elect  among 
the  angels  would  hardly,  to  his  loyal  mind,  seem  quite 
the  peers  of  a  half-divine  royal  family.  If,  however, 


1789.  ANGELS  OR  DEVILS.  11 

anything  could  excuse  his  maudlin  sentimentalism,  if 
anything  could  seem  worse  than  his  unscientific  rhap- 
sody, it  would  be  the  extravagance  of  certain  of  the 
writers  who  argue,  or,  we  should  say,  who  write  on  the 
other  side.  There  is  a  M.  Jean  Bernard,  for  example, 
who  is  too  clever  a  writer  to  be  fitly  employed  in  the 
sheer  partisanship  to  which  he  has  devoted  himself,  and 
who  is  as  trying  in  his  way  as  M.  Charles  d'Hericault 
is  in  his.  To  him  the  Revolutionists  are  all  angels  of 
light,  to  him  the  Royalists  are  all  devils  of  more  or  less 
degrees  of  darkness.  Every  malign  rumor,  every  foul 
whisper  which  strikes  at  the  name  and  fame  of  any  ad- 
herent of  the  throne,  is  so  much  gospel  truth  to  this 
impassioned  advocate.  Both  these  writers  might 
well  make  a  serious  student  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion despair.  Yet  both  these  writers  are  popular 
writers,  and  act  as  guides  and  teachers  to  large  num- 
bers of  people  easily  impressed  and  with  little  oppor- 
tunity of  analysis.  Small  wonder  if,  under  such  con- 
ditions, Marie  Antoinette  is  regarded  as  a  Saint  Do- 
rothea or  as  a  Messalina  by  those  who  think  of  Saint- 
Just  only  as  the  murderous  author  of  an  obscene  poem, 
or  as  the  exalted  prophet  of  the  noblest  of  political 
creeds. 

A  kind  of  impassioned  prejudice  seems  to  govern 
most  writers  upon  the  French  Revolution.  Lacretelle, 
Louis  Blanc,  Thiers,  Mignet,  Michelet,  Lamartine,  Mar- 
tin, Taine,  and  all  the  cluster  of  the  lesser  writers,  are 
brilliant  special  pleaders,  resolute  defenders  of  the  side 
they  have  espoused.  De  Tocqueville  and  Sorel  are  more 
impartial  and  more  judicial ;  so  are  writers  like  Von  Sy- 
bel  in  Germany,  and  Mr.  H.  Morse  Stephens  in  England. 
Mill  would  have  been  impartial,  and  we  might  lament 
that  Mill  never  wrote  his  dreamed-of  history,  were  it 


12 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  I 


not  that  in  losing  Mill  we  gained  Carlyle.  Carlyle  was 
not  impartial,  but  he  made  a  great  book.  It  is  curious 
to  remember  that  his  magnificent  prose  epic  is  actually 
nearer  in  years  to  the  events  it  treats  of  than  it  is  to  us 
who  read  it  to-day.  It  is,  no  doubt,  very  hard  to  be 
either  impartial  or  judicial  about  the  French  Revolu- 
tion. The  whole  affair  is  so  dramatic,  the  darling  creeds 
appeal  so  directly  to  the  emotions,  the  central  figures 
are  so  fascinating  and  so  fatal,  that  it  is  difficult  to  keep 
cool  in  such  a  conflict,  and  to  hold  one's  reason  from 
running  to  seed  in  hatred  in  one  direction,  or  blossoming 
into  the  rank  luxuriance  of  an  exaggerated  hero-worship 
on  the  other.  The  great  secret  lies  in  remembering  that 
all  the  figures  of  the  French  Revolution  were  men  and 
women  like  ourselves,  animated  by  like  passions,  pur- 
poses, virtues,  failings,  hopes,  and  fears ;  that  a  mob  re- 
mains a  mob,  whether  it  raves,  bristling  with  pikes  and 
capped  with  crimson,  around  an  iron  lantern,  or  over- 
throws the  railings  of  a  park;  that  we  all  can  turn  to 
contemporaries  of  our  own  who,  under  slightly  differing 
conditions,  might  very  well  have  played  the  parts  of  a 
Danton  or  Lafayette,  a  Vergniaud  or  a  La  Rochejaque- 
lein.  It  may  be  well  for  the  wisest  of  us,  in  expatiating 
upon  the  faults  of  a  Robespierre  or  the  follies  of  a  Marie 
Antoinette,  to  ask  ourselves  how  we,  under  like  condi- 
tions, could  have  withstood  on  the  one  hand  the  temp- 
tations of  absolute  power,  on  the  other  the  traditions  of 
a  monarchical  past.  Of  course  this  is  no  justification  ; 
yet,  if  the  reflection  do  but  serve  to  give  us  pause  and 
to  temper  our  invective,  it  will  have  served  its  turn  ex- 
cellently. Let  us  always,  always  remember  that  we  are 
dealing  with  men  and  women — some  of  them  even  com- 
monplace men  and  women,  that  no  fresh  race  of  beings, 
either  fiends  or  angels,  were  invented  for  the  Revolu- 


1789  MEN  AND  WOMEX.  13 

tionary  period,  and  we  shall  do  fairly  well,  and  come 
out  in  the  end  with  a  more  human  as  well  as  a  more 
humane  appreciation  of  perhaps  the  greatest  pages  of 
history. 


14  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 


CHAPTER  II. 

SEEDS    OF    REVOLUTION. 

WE  begin  well  if  we  start  off  with  the  heroic  deter- 
mination to  be  as  impartial  as  we  can  in  our  attitude 
towards  the  actors  in  the  great  drama,  to  bear  in  mind 
and  earnestly  apply  the  excellent  maxim  "  Put  yourself 
in  his  place,"  and  to  regard  each  and  all  of  them  not  as 
men  and  women  strangely  habited  and  removed  from 
us  by  the  gap  of  a  century,  bnt  as  friends  with  whom 
we  may  have  come  into  contact  in  the  chances  of  public, 
of  social,  of  civil  life.  Once  in  this  even  and  exemplary 
temper,  we  may  with  free  minds  turn  our  attention  to 
the  preliminaries  of  the  great  piece. 

Perhaps  we  may  catch  the  first  clattering  discordant 
note  of  the  Revolutionary  Carillon  on  the  day  when 
the  bells  of  Paris  were  tolling  for  the  illustrious  dead. 
Alas  for  the  poor  Sun-King,  the  luckless  Roi-Soleil  ! 
What  a  dismal  epilogue  to  all  his  long  and  lustrous 
reign,  filled  with  wars  and  the  rumors  of  wars  and  pom- 
pous enunciations  of  "L'lStat,  c'est  Moi,"  and  stately 
high-heeled  passions  for  innumerable  mistresses,  from 
giddy  Montespans  and  their  like  to  grave  De  Mainte- 
nons,  coifed  and  clerical.  The  dingy  funeral,  scantily, 
even  scurvily,  escorted,  the  scornful  populace  varying 
indifference  with  actual  pelting  of  stones  ;  such  were 
the  sorry  obsequies  of  the  Great  King.  While  he  lived 
the  world  was  ringing  with  his  name ;  dead,  it  did  not 
matter  where  they  huddled  him,  or  how.  There  never 


1715.  -  JESUITS  AND  JANSENISTS.  15 

was  a  more  impressive  sermon  on  the  glory  and  the 
nothing  of  a  name.  The  king,  whose  word  was  law, 
could  not  bind  his  successors  even  by  the  solemn  state- 
ments of  the  royal  testament.  His  will  was  set  aside, 
treated  like  so  much  waste  paper.  The  eighteenth  cent- 
ury, practically  beginning  with  the  death  of  Louis  XIV. 
as  the  eighteenth  century  begins  in  England  with  the 
death  of  Anne,  marks  its  iconoclastic  career  from  the 
onset  by  its  derision  of  the  last  of  the  despots.  Abso- 
lute monarchy  was  never  more  completely  exemplified 
than  in  Louis  XIV.,  but  the  century  which  was  to  end 
in  the  culbute  generate  and  upheaval  of  the  kingly 
principle  began  by  treating  the  final  wishes  of  a  great 
king  as  of  no  more  moment  than  the  catch  of  an  old 
song.  The  Revolution  could  not  be  far  off  when  the 
Parisians  pelted  the  unsepulchred  coffin  of  the  great 
monarch,  and  his  last  august  wishes  were  lightly  daffed 
aside. 

The  seeds  of  religious  controversy,  which  Louis  XIV. 
sowed,  proved  fertile  in  revolutionary  ideas.  France 
was  by  no  means  Ultramontane  ;  Louis  XIV.  endeav- 
ored to  make  it  so.  The  early  part  of  the  eighteenth 
century  is  the  theatre  of  a  pitched  battle  between  the 
Jesuits  and  the  Jansenists,  in  which  the  weight  of  the 
royal  influence  was  given  to  the  Jesuit  camp. 

Jansenius,  bishop  of  Ypres,  after  passing  his  life 
largely  in  the  study  of  the  writings  of  St.  Augustine, 
died  on  May  6,  1638.  Two  years  after  his  death,  in 
1640,  Frommond  published  at  Louvain  a  posthumous 
work  of  Jansen's,  "  Augustinus  S. :  Doctrina  S.  Aug.  de 
Hum.  Naturae  Sanitate,  Aegritudine,  Medicina,  adversus 
Pelagianos  et  Massilienses."  In  his  will  he  referred  his 
book  to  the  judgment  of  the  Holy  See,  while  express- 
ing his  belief  that  it  contained  no  doctrinal  error.  But 


16  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 

this  declaration  of  Jansen's  was  suppressed  by  the  pub- 
lisher of  the  book.  The  book  created  the  greatest  ex- 
citement in  the  theological  world.  It  rallied  around  it 
the  most  impassioned  advocates,  and  against  it  the 
most  impassioned  antagonists.  Its  second  edition  was 
condemned  at  Rome  in  1641  and  again  in  1642  by  Ur- 
ban VIII.  for  repeating  the  errors  of  Baius  in  his  exag- 
gerations of  the  Augustinian  doctrines  of  grace.  Baius 
had  bowed  meekly  to  the  censure  of  the  Holy  See,  but 
the  "Disciples  of  St.  Augustine,"  as  the  Jansenists 
called  themselves,  were  not  so  meek.  They  rallied 
their  forces  ;  contested  the  papal  decree.  In  1653,  In- 
nocent X.  launched  a  fresh  bull  condemning  the  five 
propositions  in  which  the  hostile  French  bishops  found 
the  pith  of  Jansenian  doctrine.  These  five  propositions 
were  : — Firstly  :  That  there  are  divine  precepts  which 
good  men  are  unable  to  obey  for  want  of  God's  grace, 
although  desirous  to  do  so.  Secondly  :  That  no  person 
can  resist  the  influence  of  divine  grace  when  bestowed. 
Thirdly  :  That,  for  human  actions  to  be  meritorious, 
it  is  not  necessary  that  they  should  be  exempt  from 
necessity,  but  only  from  constraint.  Fourthly  :  That 
the  Semi-Pelagians  err  grievously  in  maintaining  that 
the  human  will  is  endowed  with  power  of  either  receiv- 
ing or  resisting  the  aids  and  influences  of  preventive 
grace.  Fifthly  :  That  whoever  maintains  that  Jesus 
Christ  made  expiation  by  his  sufferings  and  death  for 
the  sins  of  all  mankind  is  a  Semi-Pelagian. 

The  Jansenists  did  not  accept  defeat.  While  they 
wished  to  remain  in  external  communication  with  the 
Church,  they  cast  about  for  means  of  checkmating  the 
papal  bull.  Ingenious  Jansenist  divines  argued  that 
while  they  accepted  the  papal  censure  of  the  five  points, 
they  refused  to  recognize  that  those  five  points  were  to 


1640-1713.  JANSENISM.  17 

be  found  in  Jansen's  writings.  In  this  way  they  carried 
on  the  fight  against  their  opponents  in  Rome  and  the 
powerful  Jesuit  party  in  France  until  the  appearance 
of  their  great  champion,  Pascal.  Never  did  any  cause 
find  a  more  brilliant  defender.  Jansenism  has  passed 
away;  that  great  fight  is  over,  dead  and  buried,  but 
still  men  of  all  creeds  and  of  all  opinions  read  and  de- 
light in  the  immortal  "  Provincial  Letters."  It  has  been 
truly  said  by  the  most  uncompromising  opponents  of 
Jansenism  that  Pascal's  letters  touch  every  chord  of  the 
human  heart,  and  that  their  sudden  transitions  from 
logic  and  wit  to  sublime  and  pathetic  eloquence  pro- 
duce an  effect  which  can  be  neither  resisted  nor  effaced. 
But  Pascal  died  young,  in  1662,  and  the  glory  of  the 
Jansenist  cause  was  gone.  Censure  after  censure  thun- 
dered from  Rome;  in  France,  the  face  of  royalty  was 
set  very  sternly  against  the  sect. 

Louis  had  come  to  regard  the  Jansenists  as  Republi- 
cans in  the  Church  and  Republicans  in  the  State.  His 
destruction  of  Port  Royal  in  1710  was  a  heavy  blow  ;  a 
heavier  was  that  dealt  in  1713  at  the  "Reflexions  Mo- 
rales sur  le  Nouveau  Testament"  of  Father  Quesnel  in 
the  papal  document  so  famous  throughout  the  eigh- 
teenth century  as  the  bull  "  Unigenitus." 

Into  the  merits  or  demerits  of  the  "Reflexions  Mo- 
rales "  it  is  not  necessary  to  enter  here  ;  nor  is  it  neces- 
sary to  offer  criticism  upon  the  conception  or  the  enun- 
ciation of  the  bull  "  Uniorenitus."  But  the  bull  aroused 

O 

the  greatest  excitement  and  the  strongest  opposition. 
At  an  assemblage  of  bishops  in  Paris,  a  minority  of 
fourteen  prelates,  headed  by  Cardinal  de  Noailles,  op- 
posed the  majority  of  forty  who  supported  the  Jesuit 
Le  Tellier  and  the  Bull.  The  division  spread  through- 
out the  whole  of  the  Church.  The  Ultramontane  party 
I.— 2 


18  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 

stood  to  their  guns,  and  took  strong  measures  to  en- 
force the  acceptance  of  the  Constitution.  The  rebel- 
lious bishops  were  dismissed  to  their  dioceses  ;  the  prel- 
ates who  had  not  been  present  at  the  Assembly  were 
called  upon  by  the  king  to  renew  their  adhesion  to  the 
propositions  of  the  bull;  the  Sorbonne,  which  had  re- 
jected it  by  a  majority  of  votes,  was  peremptorily 
ordered  to  register  it,  and  the  same  duty  was  sternly 
laid  upon  a  protesting  Parliament. 

Louis  soon  found  that  he  had  raised  a  whirlwind 
about  his  ears.  His  suppression,  not  merely  of  Father 
Quesnel's  book,  but  of  all  writings  issued  in  its  defence; 
his  forbidding,  under  heavy  pains  and  penalties,  the 
publication  in  the  future  of  any  other  defence,  had  not 
the  desired  result.  Dying,  he  left  France  distracted  by 
the  desperate  fierceness  of  a  religious  feud  which  had 
affected  all  classes  in  the  State,  and  which  was  in  itself 
no  small  cause  of  the  almost  indecent  satisfaction  with 
which  the  country  at  large  heard  of  the  setting  of  the 
Sun-King. 

In  the  dawn  of  the  regency  of  the  Duke  of  Orleans 
it  seemed  for  a  moment  as  if  the  existing  conditions  of 
things  were  to  undergo  a  vital  change.  A  cool  demo- 
cratic wind  began  to  blow  through  the  heated  mo- 
narchical atmosphere.  Strange  democratic  words  were 
made  use  of  by  the  regent  himself  in  his  very  edicts. 
He  spoke  of  the  "  rights  of  the  nation  ;"  he  declared 
that,  in  the  event  of  the  absence  of  legitimate  successors 
to  the  throne,  the  gift  of  the  crown  belonged  to  France 
alone.  Not  in  words  alone,  but  in  deeds,  the  regent 
showed  himself  opposed  to  the  policy  of  the  late  king. 
He  gave  back  to  the  Parliament  its  right  of  remon- 
strance, of  which  it  had  been  deprived  ;  he  set  aside  the 
late  king's  will;  he  came  very  near  to  summoning  the 


1618-93.        A  NEW  PHASE  OF  FRENCH  HISTORY.  19 

States-General.  The  lettres  de  cachet  in  force  were 
carefully  scrutinized,  and  a  large  number  of  persons  im- 
prisoned in  the  Bastille  were  set  free.  In  the  religious 
controversy  that  was  raging  he  took  a  different  attitude 
from  that  of  the  late  king.  He  set  at  liberty  all  the 
many  persons  who  were  in  prison  for  their  Jansenist 
opinions.  The  Cardinal  de  Noailles,  who  had  been  in 
disgrace,  and  against  whom  a  lettre  de  cachet  was  said 
to  be  actually  pending,  was  named  President  of  the 
Council  of  Ecclesiastical  Affairs.  Le  Tellier  conceived 
it  prudent  to  withdraw  from  popular  dislike  into  volun- 
tary exile.  So  far  had  the  reaction  gone  that  complete 
suppression  of  the  Jesuits  was  mooted  ;  but  the  pro- 
posal in  the  end  resolved  itself  merely  into  an  order 
forbidding  them  the  pulpit  and  the  confessional. 

With  the  Regency  we  enter  upon  a  new  phase  of 
French  history  ;  the  gavotte  begins  which  is  destined 
to  end  in  the  Carmagnole.  To  the  gravity,  the  pom- 
posity, the  heroics  of  the  Great  King  succeed  the  wan- 
tonness, the  license,  the  devil- may-careness  of  the  Re- 
gency. Louis  XIV.  was  profligate  enough,  but  he 
environed  his  profligacy  with  a  certain  decorum  which 
was  wholly  wanting  in  Philippe  of  Orleans.  We  move 
at  once  in  a  more  buffoon  world,  a  world  of  light 
comedy,  brilliant  with  painted  mistresses,  with  opera- 
girls,  with  dancers  and  dainty  abbes,  with  adventurers 
of  the  sword  and  adventurers  of  the  robe — a  world  of 
intrigue  and  shady  finance,  of  bright  persistent  de- 
bauchery, a  mad,  bad  business,  ruinous  for  France. 

There  were  evil  deeds,  enough  and  to  spare,  in  Louis 
XIV. 's  reign.  Long  before  its  evening,  a  kind  of  crap- 
ulosity  seems  to  have  set  in,  which  in  itself  was  fertile 
stuff  for  the  quickening  of  Revolution.  The  memoirs 
of  the  time,  the  writings  of  Bussy  Rabutin,  reveal  to 


20  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 

us  a  grave  degree  of  corruption  among  the  rising  nobil- 
ity which-  disagreeably  affected  Louis,  and  which  was 
significant  in  its  warnings.  When  we  read  of  the  way 
in  which  some  of  the  young  nobles,  some  of  the  bearers 
of  famous  names,  such  as  the  bearer  of  the  name  of  Col- 
bert, were  banded  together  for  debaucheries,  atrocities, 
and  excesses  of  the  most  degrading  type,  we  can  only 
wonder  that  the  Revolution  did  not  break  out  long  be- 
fore its  time.  The  satyr-like  lust  and  fiend-like  cruelty 
of  some  of  the  acts  recorded  of  these  young  nobles  must 
be  borne  in  mind  when  we  think  upon  the  horrors  which 
disfigured  the  time  of  the  Terror.  When  we  read  of 
two  cases  in  particular  in  which  these  wearers  of  great 
names  inflicted  horrible  torture — for  the  mere  sake  of 
torture — upon  a  woman  who  was  their  plaything,  and 
upon  an  unfortunate  man  who  died  of  his  sufferings, 
we  wonder  if  any  descendant  of  either  of  those  unhappy 
victims  took  part  in  the  September  massacres,  and  sated 
in  those  wild  days  a  revenge  that  was  none  the  less  wel- 
come because  it  had  been  long  delayed. 

The  record  of  the  Regency  could  only  be  considered 
an  exhilarating  study  by  a  new  Timon.  Presided  over 
nominally  by  a  debauched  prince,  who  was  suspected  of 
being  a  murderer,  and  who  was  known  to  be  a  profli- 
gate and  a  sot,  swayed  by  a  ribald,  intriguing  Church- 
man, France  was  undoubtedly  come  to  a  pretty  pass. 
The  high  dignity,  the  spacious  splendor  of  Louis  XIV., 
were  rapidly  resolving  themselves  into  ruin.  The  eigh- 
teenth century  can  scarcely  boast  a  darker,  an  abler,  or 
more  degraded  spirit  than  Dubois.  It  produced  no  more 
perversely  immoral  ruler  than  the  Regent  Philip.  But 
both  were  men  of  extraordinary  ability  ;  both  were,  in 
their  strange  way,  statesmen.  They  had  original  ideas 
of  foreign  policy  with  its  English  leanings,  stimulated, 


1719.  THE  RUE  QUIXCAMPOIX.  21 

it  shall  be  said,  by  English  gold,  with  its  Triple  Alli- 
ance growing  into  its  Quadruple  Alliance,  with  its  swift 
unmasking  of  Cellamare's  conspiracy,  to  which  memoir- 
writing  Jean  Buvat  contributed,  its  humiliation  of  Spain, 
its  Brittany  executions,  its  upheaval  of  Alberoni,  its  fan- 
tastic shuffling  of  the  court  cards  in  the  European  pack. 
They  had  original  ideas,  too,  of  finance,  with  their  cham- 
bre  ardente  for  inquiry  into  the  claims  of  farmers-gen- 
eral and  other  public  creditors,  its  tortures,  its  impris- 
onments, its  victims,  its  collapse  ;  with  their  John  Law 
lunacy  of  an  endless  paper  currency  as  grotesque  as  that 
which  captivates  the  German  emperor  in  the  second  part 
of  "  Faust,"  its  other  John  Law  lunacy  of  the  Missis- 
sippi scheme,  with  its  mushroom  fortunes  and  final  ca- 
tastrophe. The  most  amazing  thing  in  all  that  Regency 
is  the  Rue  Quincampoix,  with  its  feverish  crowds,  a 
Vanity  Fair  of  the  maddest  kind,  in  which  lords  and 
lackeys,  prelates  and  shopkeepers,  prostitutes  and  prin- 
esses  jostled  and  elbowed  in  the  common  race  for  wealth, 
and  which  ends  with  the  prudent  Prince  de  Conti  ex- 
changing his  paper  money  for  three  cart-loads  of  solid 
silver — one  seems  to  see  those  three  argentiferous  carts 
lumbering  through  the  narrow  Parisian  streets — in  the 
universal  crash,  and  in  John  Law  dying  in  squalid  pov- 
erty in  Venice,  without  much  i-eason  to  be  thankful  that 
he  escaped  alive  from  the  wild  hands  of  the  Paris  mob. 
Seldom  has  it  been  given  to  any  single  individual  to  ac- 
complish such  widespread  desolation,  such  national  ruin 
and  despair,  as  John  Law  accomplished.  The  advent- 
urous Scottish  gentleman  who  was  to  make  everybody 
rich — with  pieces  of  paper — had  promised  infatuated 
Philip  that  he  would  wipe  out  the  national  debt  of 
France,  and  leave  it  as  if  it  had  never  been.  He  left  it 
increased  to  a  grand  total  of  six  hundred  and  twenty-five 


22  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 

millions  of  francs.  Statesman  after  statesman,  finan- 
cier after  financier,  will  strive  to  patch  that  business 
together  again,  to  caulk  the  leaky  places  ;  good  and 
bad,  wise  and  foolish,  all  will  make  their  effort  to  mend 
Law's  colossal  madness,  all  will  try  down  to  Necker  ; 
but  by  the  time  it  comes  to  Necker's  turn  the  work 
which  John  Law  was  really  sent  into  the  world  to  do 
will  have  ripened  to  its  due  fruition. 

A  little  later,  in  1725,  a  momentous  thing  happened, 
which  at  first  scarcely  seemed  momentous.  An  English 
nobleman,  Lord  Derwentwater,  is  said  to  have  founded 
in  Paris  in  this  year  the  "  Loge  Anglaise,"  the  first  Free- 
masons' lodge  in  France  ;  another  English  nobleman, 
the  Duke  of  Richmond,  set  up  another  in  his  Aubigny 
castle  a  little  later.  It  would  be  vain,  and  worse  than 
vain,  to  attempt  to  penetrate  back  into  the  past  for  the 
early  history  of  Freemasonry.  We  may,  if  we  please, 
accept,  with  Masonic  writers,  the  statement  that  it  ex- 
isted "ever  since  symmetry  began  and  harmony  dis- 
played her  charms."  We  may  agree,  with  Charles  Kings- 
ley,  that  the  uninitiate  have  little  right  to  any  opinion 
on  the  mediaeval  lodge  of  Kilwinning  and  its  Scotch 
degrees,  on  the  seven  Templars  who,  after  Jacques  de 
Molay  was  burned  in  Paris,  revived  the  order  on  the 
Scottish  isle  of  Mull,  on  the  Masons  who  built  Magde- 
burg Cathedral,  in  876,  on  Magnus  Grecus,  on  Hiram  of 
Tyre,  and  many  another  name  and  date  important  in  the 
annals  of  Freemasonry.  It  is  perhaps  audacious  for  any 
one  not  a  Mason  to  speak  of  its  history  and  its  myster- 
ies ;  on  the  other  hand,  Masons  are  not,  we  understand, 
permitted  to  speak  of  the  tenets  or  the  traditions  of 
their  order.  Such  accounts  as  exist  of  Freemasonry 
differ  in  the  most  extraordinary  degree  according  as 
the  writers  are  animated  by  an  enthusiasm  for  or  an 


1725.  MASONRY.  23 

aversion  to  the  sect.  Thus  we  shall  find  one  set  of 
writers  leaping  lovingly  back  to  the  sacerdotalism  of 
ancient  Egypt,  progressing  to  the  Dionysia  of  old 
Greece,  and  dwelling  affectionately  upon  the  legend  of 
the  building  of  Solomon's  temple  and  the  fate  of  the 
architect  Hiram  Abi,  murdered  for  the  sake  of  the  se- 
cret word  which  he  refused  to  reveal  to  his  three  ap- 
prentices with  the  queer  names  of  Jubelas,  Jubelos,  and 
Jubelum.  From  the  grave  of  the  murdered  Hiram 
comes  the  acacia  plant,  whose  name  is  said  to  play  so 
large  a  part  in  Masonic  symbolism.  According  to  this 
legend  the  Masonic  mystery  is  to  find  out  the  lost  pass- 
word of  the  temple.  Other  scarcely  less  fanciful  author- 
ities talk  wild  words  about  Manes,  founder  of  Mani- 
chaeanism,  and  the  purpose  of  avenging  his  death  at  the 
hands  of  a  Persian  king  by  a  regicide  league  striking 
at  all  Icings.  Others  pretended  that  the  Freemasons 
were  simply  the  proscribed  and  ruined  Templars  under 
a  new  name,  and  that  their  cherished  purpose  was  ven- 
geance of  the  death  of  Jacques  de  Molay.  More  hos- 
tile critics,  however,  go  no  further  back  than  the  medi- 
aeval migratory  Mason  guilds,  with  their  ceremonials 
aped  from  Benedictine  ritual ;  we  hear  much  of  the 
disputed  Cologne  charter  of  1535,  signed  at  the  open- 
ing of  the  cathedral  by  Melanchthon,  Coligny,  and  oth- 
ers; and  Elias  Ashmole,  the  Englishman  who  founded, 
in  1646,  the  order  of  the  Rosicrucians,  comes  in  for  his 
share  of  denunciation  for  his  strange  blend  of  Masonry 
and  occultism.  All  these  various  legends  and  various 
opinions  offer  interesting  enough  matter  for  the  studies 
and  the  speculations  of  the  scholarly  occult.  But  the 
serious  importance  of  the  part  which  Freemasonry  was 
destined  to  play  in  the  history  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion depends  in  no  degree  upon  the  truth  or  the  untruth 


24  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  II. 

of  the  legends  about  Hiram,  about  Manes,  or  anybody 
else  before  the  days  of  Lord  Derwentwater.  For  our 
purpose  it  is  enough  to  accept  the  fact  that,  in  1717,  the 
Grand  Lodge  of  England  was  established  by  certain 
English  noblemen  and  gentlemen  in  London,  who  met 
together  in  lodges  at  the  Goose  and  Gridiron,  in  St. 
Paul's,  at  the  Crown  near  Drury  Lane,  at  the  Apple 
Tree  near  Covent  Garden,  and  at  the  Rummer  and 
Grapes  in  Channel  Row,  Westminster.  These  English 
noblemen  and  gentlemen  bad  little  thought,  at  the  time 
when  they  met  together  under  the  hospitable  rafters  of 
these  pleasantly  named  London  taverns,  of  the  part  the 
work  they  had  in  hand  would  yet  play  in  the  destinies 
of  nations  and  the  fates  of  kings.  But  when  Lord  Der- 
wentwater and  the  Duke  of  Richmond  pitched  their 
Freemasons'  tent  in  France  they  began  a  business  which 
resulted  most  amazingly.  For  the  thing  spread  and 
spread  all  over  the  continent  of  Europe.  Introduced 
by  Englishmen  into  Germany,  Austria,  Russia,  Swit- 
zerland, Italy,  Spain,  Portugal ;  introduced  into  Swe- 
den and  Poland  from  France,  which  itself  owed  its  Ma- 
sonic inspiration  to  England,  we  find  the  English  or  the 
Scottish  lodges  weaving  all  Europe  together  into  the 
complicated  web  of  a  great  organization.  Kings  and 
princes  were  among  its  earliest  initiate  ;  Crown  Prince 
Frederick,  afterwards  to  be  famous  as  Frederick  the 
Great,  Francis  I.  of  Austria,  and  many  a  noble  name  be- 
sides, are  inscribed  upon  its  earliest  rolls.  There  is  a 
name  yet  to  be  inscribed  upon  its  rolls,  the  name  of  a 
prince  not  yet  born  to  the  House  of  Orleans,  which 
will  be  most  instrumental  in  aiding  the  work  which 
Freemasonry  was  destined  to  do  in  France.  In  the 
meantime  Freemasonry,  waiting  for  the  birth  of  Equal- 
ity Orleans,  grew  and  throve  in  Europe,  undismayed 


1788.  CHARLES  EDWARD   IN   ARRAS.  25 

by  the  papal  excommunication   levelled  against  it  in 
1738. 

At  this  particular  time,  however,  Continental  Free- 
masonry had  not  dreamed  of  the  phases  through  which 
it  was  yet  to  pass.  Lord  Derwentwater  did  not  antici- 
pate Adam  Weishaupt  and  the  mysterious  Illuminati, 
with  their  strange  cipher  L.P.D.,  which,  being  inter- 
preted, means  "Lilia  Pedibus  Destrue,"  and  signifies 
the  doom  of  kings.  He  did  not  dream  of  that  strangest 
of  strange  Illuminated,  Balsamo-Cagliostro,  and  all  that 
was  to  come  through  him.  We  shall  meet  with  Cagli- 
ostro  in  his  season,  and  with  the  Illuminati  and  their 
terrible  L.P.D.  In  the  meantime  it  is  curious  to  re- 
member that  a  legend,  which  seems  to  be  something 
more  than  a  legend,  declares  that  Prince  Charles  Ed- 
ward himself  founded,  in  the  town  of  Arras,  a  Scottish 
Freemason  lodge,  of  which  the  first  president  was  Robes- 
pierre's father.  If  the  story  were  true,  it  would  only 
be  one  further  proof  of  the  dramatic  completeness  of 
the  revolutionary  story  which  so  early  associates  with 
a  body  destined  to  play  so  great  a  part  in  the  Revolu- 
tion the  name  which,  of  all  others,  stands  out  most 
conspicuously  in  association  with  it.  When  we  meet 
with  the  Freemasons  again  we  shall  find  that  they  have 
greatly  changed  in  power  and  influence  from  their  little 
groups  of  exiled  Jacobites  and  their  small  beginnings 
in  the  days  of  the  Regency. 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  I1JL 


CHAPTER  III. 

LOUIS    THE    WELL-BELOVED. 

IT  is  not  necessary  to  linger  longer  over  the  mud  and 
swine  idyl  of  the  Regency.  While  growing  Freemason- 
ry was  striking  its  tap-roots  in  all  directions,  while  the 
financial  fantasies  of  law  had  given  a  further  impetus 
to  national  financial  ruin,  Regent  Philip  contented  him- 
self with  reeling  from  desire  to  satiety,  and  from  satie- 
ty to  desire,  like  a  more  vulgar  Faust,  and  left  every- 
thing in  the  hands  of  Dubois.  In  the  battle  of  the  bull 
"Unigenitus"  Dubois  had  espoused  the  bull  and  the 
papal  court,  and  had  obtained  the  archbishopric  of  Cam- 
brai.  It  is  one  of  the  eternal  ironies  of  history  that 
among  the  names  supporting  Dubois  in  his  claim  to  the 
archbishopric  is  that  of  the  good,  the  just,  the  noble 
Massillon.  In  spite  of  all  the  opposition  that  the  des- 
perate and  despairing  Jansenists  could  make,  Dubois 
forced  the  Jansenistic  Parliament  of  Paris  to  register 
the  combated  edict,  and  the  constitution  embodied  in 
the  bull  became  established  law.  In  the  February  of 
1723  Louis  XV.  attained  his  legal  majority,  Orleans  re- 
signed his  regency  and  became  President  of  the  Coun- 
cil of  State,  which  included  among  its  members  Dubois. 
But  just  in  this  crowning  moment  Dubois  died  in  the 
August  of  1723,  and  in  the  December  of  the  same  year 
the  regent  followed  him,  and  there  were  two  scoundrels 
the  less  in  France. 

Philip  of  Orleans  dead  and  out  of  the  way,  the  Duke 


1726.  LOUIS  XV.  27 

of  Bourbon  obtained  from  the  young  king  the  position 
of  first  minister.  Ignorant  of  everything  except  the 
chase,  a  humble  servant  of  the  Marquise  de  Prie,  a  tool 
in  the  hands  of  financier  Paris  Duvernay,  the  duke  was 
eminently  calculated  to  carry  on  all  that  was  worst  in 
the  government  of  Philip  of  Orleans.  The  religious 
war  still  raged.  The  Jesuits  grew  more  and  more  pow- 
erful, the  Jansenists  more  and  more  feeble.  The  young 
king's  bride,  Maria  Leszczynska,  daughter  of  the  King 
of  Poland,  then  resting  in  pensioned  exile  in  Alsace,  re- 
ceived the  surname  of  Unigenita  in  graceful  allusion  to 
the  famous  and  triumphant  bull.  In  the  very  earliest 
years  of  the  young  king's  reign  the  spirit  of  sedition 
asserted  itself  ;  the  spirit  of  constitutional  resistance  to 
aggravated  authority  made  itself  felt.  The  scarcity  of 
bread,  that  unfailing  source  of  popular  disaffection, 
caused  several  serious  riots  in  1725.  Caen,  Rouen, 
Rennes  were  the  scenes  of  desperate  conflicts.  In  Paris 
itself  some  two  thousand  rioters  straggled  through  the 
streets,  shouting  and  pillaging.  They  were  dispersed 
at  the  point  of  the  sword  ;  two  of  them  were  hanged 
on  high  gallows  in  the  chief  street  of  the  Faubourg 
Saint-Antoine ;  but  the  spirit  of  hungry  discontent  still 
muttered  ominously  underground  and  was  only  silenced, 
only  staved  off,  by  measures  which  lowered  the  price  of 
bread.  But  a  more  serious  sign  was  shown  in  the  con- 
duct of  the  Paris  Parliament  when  it  protested  in  the 
very  presence  of  the  king  himself  holding  his  bed  of 
justice  against  certain  taxes,  including  one  of  a  fiftieth 
upon  all  the  revenues  of  the  kingdom,  which  had  not 
been  previously  submitted  to  the  magistrates. 

"  Do  not  be  late  for  supper,  duke,"  said  Louis  XV. 
graciously  to  Bourbon  on  June  11,  1726,  as  he  left  Ver- 
sailles for  Rambouillet,  whither  he  bade  the  duke  follow 


28  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 

him  speedily.  The  duke  did  not  appreciate  the  fine 
point  of  irony  in  the  king's  civility  till  the  king  had 
gone.  Then  an  order  arrived,  signed  with  the  royal 
hand,  dismissing  Bourbon  to  his  domain  at  Chantilly. 
And  so,  like  the  Eastman  in  the  Gunnlaug  Saga,  he  is 
out  of  the  tale.  Madame  de  Prie  was  whistled  down 
the  wind  to  Normandy  ;  Duvernay  was  clapped  into 
the  Bastille ;  Fleury  was  raised  to  the  rank  of  first 
minister,  and  the  Cardinal's  red  hat  soon  reached  him 
from  Rome.  For  seventeen  years  Fleury,  who  was 
seventy  years  old  at  the  time  of  his  triumph,  held  well- 
nigh  royal  sway  in  France.  Astute,  subtle,  of  gentle 
and  simple  bearing,  Fleury  united  the  sagacity  of  a 
fifth-rate  statesman  with  the  decorum  of  a  fifth-rate 
Churchman,  and  between  his  sagacity  and  his  decorum 
he  held  his  own.  Those  wild  popular  commotions 
which  characterized  the  administrations  of  the  regent 
and  of  Bourbon  died  away ;  the  manners  of  the  court 
and  of  the  great  nobles  were  modified  to  something 
dimly  approaching  to  decency  ;  financial  economy  re- 
stored public  credit ;  foreign  policy  was  guided  in  the 
direction  of  peace ;  a  pinchbeck  Saturnian  age  seemed 
to  be  established.  But  the  retrospective  observer  can 
discern  that  revolution  is  still  afoot.  The  desperate 
battle  of  Jesuits  and  Jansenists  still  raged,  and  the 
Jesuits  found  in  Fleury,  who  had  been  an  ardent  Jan- 
senist,  a  devoted  champion.  The  miracles  reported  from 
the  grave  of  the  Jansenist  Paris  at  St.  Medard  Ceme- 
tery led  to  the  closing  of  the  cemetery  in  1732  by  order 
of  the  government,  and  to  the  promulgation  of  the  fa- 
mous epigram  : 

"De  par  le  Roi,  defense  &  Dieu 
D'operer  miracles  en  ce  lieu." 

Condemnation  after  condemnation  fell  upon  the  heads 


1730.  "LA   BELLE   GENITUS."  29 

of  those  who  still  protested  against  the  bull  "  Unigeni- 
tus."  Yet  its  opponents  multiplied.  The  majority  of 
the  Parisians  were  opposed  to  it ;  and  the  ranks  of  op- 
position were  swelled  by  all  Adullamites,  by  all  who 
were  discontented  and  in  danger  and  in  debt,  by  all 
who  disliked  the  government  or  who  liked  disturbance, 
by  all  those  floating  forces  of  agitation  if  not  of  disaf- 
fection which  are  rendered  for  the  moment  homogene- 
ous by  a  great  opposition  movement.  The  battle  over 
the  bull  "  Unigenitus  "  was  one  of  the  training-schools 
of  the  Revolution.  Not  that  very  many  of  its  fiercest 
opponents  knew  or  cared  to  know  what  the  bull  really 
was  or  what  it  really  meant.  It  may  be  fairly  said  that 
in  general  nobody  understood  anything  about  those 
questions  of  doctrine  with  which  the  bull  was  con- 
cerned. There  were  people  who  called  it  "la  belle 
Genitus."  But  it  served  as  a  rallying-cry,  as  a  common 
banner ;  it  set  people  thinking,  talking,  acting ;  the 
Parliament  of  Paris  was  in  the  forefront  of  the  fight. 
The  proposal  of  Benoit  XIII.  to  amplify  the  Breviary 
by  a  lesson  in  which  Gregory  VII.  was  lauded  for  hav- 
ing excommunicated  an  emperor  and  released  his  sub- 
jects from  their  oath  of  allegiance  was  combated  by 
the  Parliament,  and  a  printed  sheet  set  in  circulation 
and  containing  the  new  lesson  and  prayer  was  suppressed 
by  the  Parliament. 

The  fight  raged  and  was  to  rage  yet  for  generations. 
On  the  one  side  the  puppet  king  and  the  dexterous 
septuagenarian  man  of  schemes,  his  minister,  and  all 
Ultramontanism  ;  on  the  other,  the  Parliaments  and  all 
the  waning  strength  of  Jansenism,  swollen  and  sup- 
ported by  all  possible  elements  of  disorder  that  could 
be  attracted  to  a  struggle  against  a  government.  We 
may  note  a  fiery  Abbe  Pucelle,  at  white  heat  of  impas- 


30 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 


sioned  Jansenism,  sneering  at  Fleury — quantum  mutatus 
ab  illof—and  informing  an  astounded  king  that  duty 
to  the  sovereign  sometimes  compelled  disobedience  to 
his  orders.  We  may  note  contumacious  parliaments 
defying  royal  authority  to  a  certain  point,  and  yielding 
when  the  royal  screw  is  put  on  heavily,  always  under 
the  guidance  of  the  grave,  imperturbable  Fleury.  No 
wild  writings  on  the  wall  invoking  destruction  on  the 
Constitution  and  its  supporters  could  alarm  that  deter- 
mined old  man  ;  could  alarm,  indeed,  his  determined 
colleagues.  The  dwarfish,  humpbacked  Bishop  of  Laon, 
half  an  Aramis  and  half  a  De  Retz,  of  whom  it  was 
said  that  he  would  have  been  the  devil  of  a  fellow  if  he 
had  only  been  a  musketeer,  declared  that  the  only  way 
out  of  the  whole  difficulty  was  to  hand  the  greater  part 
of  the  public  power  back  into  the  hands  of  the  bishops 
in  order  to  save  a  hereticized  France  from  destruction. 
The  Parliament  ordered  the  suppression  of  these  utter- 
ances. The  bishop  retorted  by  threatening  excommu- 
nication to  any  one  who  should  venture  .to  read  the 
parliamentary  order,  and  recited  the  prayers  against  the 
enemies  of  the  Church. 

At  Rome  the  Holy  See  solemnly  burned  the  famous 
"  Consultation,"  in  which  forty  advocates  pleaded  the 
cause  of  as  many  cures  who  appealed  to  the  Parliament 
against  the  censures  of  their  bishops.  This  document, 
among  other  things,  advanced  such  significant  theories 
of  statecraft  as  that  the  Parliaments  were  the  senate  of 
the  nation,  and  the  king  was  to  be  regarded  only  as 
the  chief  of  a  sovereign  nation,  while  phrases  like  "  pub- 
lic authority "  and  "  public  power "  were  used  with 
ominous  iterance.  The  forty  advocates,  pushed  into  a 
corner,  declared  in  a  later  document  that  they  recog- 
nized that  France  was  a  monarchical  state,  and  that  the 


1730.  A   PERTINACIOUS   PARLIAMENT.  31 

* 

sovereign  authority  rested  in  the  person  of  the  monarch 
and  of  the  monarch  alone.  As  a  reward  for  this  sub- 
mission an  Order  of  Council  cleared  them  of  the  crime 
of  rebellion  ;  but  the  Archbishop  of  Paris,  dissatisfied, 
issued  an  ordinance  in  which  he  declared  that  the  whole 
of  the  forty  advocates  were  heretics,  and  asserted  that 
the  bishops  had,  in  virtue  of  their  divine  origin,  a  co- 
active  power  independent  of  the  secular  authority.  The 
Parliament  of  Paris  suppressed  this  ordinance,  where- 
upon an  Order  of  Council  ordered  both  the  high  dis- 
puting parties  to  keep  an  absolute  silence  upon  the 
whole  question  of  the  rights  of  the  two  powers.  A 
little  later,  however,  the  government  allowed  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Paris  to  promulgate  his  ordinance,  where- 
upon the  forty  advocates  declared  that  the  minister 
associated  himself  with  the  charge  of  heresy  brought 
against  them,  and  refused  to  plead.  The  legal  order  as 
a  body  followed  their  example.  Ten  advocates  were 
promptly  punished  by  exile.  Their  departure  was  con- 
verted by  popular  enthusiasm  into  a  triumph,  and  there 
was  considerable  danger  of  riot.  Laon's  wild  bishop 
attacked  the  Parliament  bitterly  ;  the  Parliament  re- 
torted by  summoning  him  before  the  Assembly  of  Peers 
for  trial,  and  the  peers  were  summoned  for  that  pur- 
pose to  attend  the  Parliament.  Fleury,  to  avoid  the 
scandal,  suppressed  the  Bishop  of  Laon's  mandate,  and 
the  Parliament  issued  its  order  of  September  7,  in  which 
it  set  forth  "that  the  temporal  power  was  independent 
of  all  other  power,  that  to  it  alone  belonged  the  right 
to  'control'  the  king's  subjects,  and  that  the  ministers 
of  the  Church  were  accountable  to  Parliament,  under 
the  authority  of  the  king,  for  the  exercise  of  their  ju- 
risdiction." 

Immediately  an  Order  of  Council,  launched  by  Fleury, 


32  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 

suppressed  this  parliamentary  mandate,  and  an  usher  of 
the  Council  was  despatched  to  strike  with  his  own  hand 
the  mandate  from  the  parliamentary  register.  At  this 
juncture  the  Parliament  rose  for  its  habitual  vacation 
of  two  months  from  September  7  to  November  12. 
When  it  met  again  it  was  faced  by  a  direct  order  from 
Fleury  forbidding  it  to  deliberate  upon  the  action  of 
the  government  with  regard  to  the  mandate  of  Sep- 
tember 7.  The  Parliament  sent  a  deputation  to  the 
king,  which  the  king  declined  to  receive,  whereupon  it 
decided  to  make  a  protest  "at  some  more  opportune 
occasion."  Fleury  took  these  words  to  mean  when  he 
should  be  no  more,  and  was  indignant.  The  Parlia- 
ment was  summoned  to  Versailles  and  roundly  repri- 
manded, and  nothing  more  was  heard  of  the  mandate 
of  September  7. 

The  battle,  lulled  for  a  while,  began  all  over  again 
when  the  Archbishop  of  Paris  condemned  the  "  Nou- 
velles  Ecelesiastiques."  The  Parliament  proceeded  to 
discuss  this  condemnation  ;  the  king  ordered  them  to 
keep  silence  till  they  learned  his  good  pleasure  ;  the 
Parliament  protested  ;  the  king  retorted  by  exiling  the 
Abbe  Pucelle  and  clapping  another  councillor  into  Vin- 
cennes.  Then  the  Parliament  defiantly  forbade  the 
distribution  of  the  Archbishop's  mandate,  and  for  fear 
that  this  order  should  be  erased,  as  was  the  order  of 
September  7,  they  had  it  printed  at  once  and  issued 
broadcast.  The  government  cancelled  the  order  and 
exiled  four  more  councillors.  Thereupon  the  majority 
of  the  magistrates,  to  the  number  of  one  hundred  and 
fifty,  signed  their  resignations  and  solemnly  marched 
out  of  the  palace  two  by  two  amidst  the  applause  of 
an  enormous  crowd,  who  hailed  them  as  Romans  and 
fathers  of  their  country.  This  was  on  June  20,  1732. 


1732.  MUTINOUS  MAGISTRATES.  33 

Fleury,  amazed  and  perturbed,  by  a  policy  of  blended 
menace  and  cajolement,  induced  the  Parliament  to  re- 
sume its  functions.  But  it  was  a  truce,  not  a  peace. 
Fleury  would  have  liked  to  abolish  the  Parliament  alto- 
gether, but,  as  this  was  too  comprehensive  a  step,  he 
began  by  endeavoring  to  reduce  its  powers.  On  August 
18,  1732,  he  addressed  a  declaration  to  the  magistrates 
which  changed  all  the  order  and  usage  of  the  Parlia- 
ment, and  limited  much  of  its  authority.  The  Parlia- 
ment protested.  The  king  held  firm,  and  the  decla- 
ration of  Fleury  was  solemnly  registered  at  a  bed  of 
justice  held  in  the  Guards'  Hall  at  Versailles.  The 
magistrates  who  had  to  attend  the  bed  of  justice  seized 
upon  the  law  which  prohibited  the  changing  of  the  seat 
of  Parliament  to  declare  the  bed  of  justice  null  and 
void.  The  government  immediately  sent  one  hundred 
and  thirty-nine  of  the  mutinous  magistrates  into  exile, 
and  then,  in  November,  as  if  fearful  of  its  own  bold- 
ness, revoked  the  exile,  recalled  the  banished  magis- 
trates, and  practically  withdrew  the  Fleury  declaration. 
This  comparative  triumph  for  the  Parliament  stirred 
up  the  Jansenists  to  fresh  activity.  Montpellier's  bish- 
op, in  a  pastoral  letter,  spoke  with  ominous  prophecy 
of  "  a  coming  revolution  which  will  substitute  a  new 
Church  for  the  existing  Church."  On  the  other  hand, 
the  Jesuits  waged  fiercer  war  than  ever.  Fleury  was 
denounced  for  his  yielding  to  the  Parliament.  The 
faithful  were  called  upon  to  rally  in  defence  of  a  threat- 
ened faith.  In  the  midst  of  all  this  welter  a  young 
king  of  four-and-twenty  hunted  and  supped  most  tran- 
quilly, and  an  aged  minister  oscillated  in  irritated  de- 
spair between  the  two  factions. 

In  the  very  white  heat  of  the  Jesuit-Jansenist  wrangle 
France  found  herself  at  war  again,  much  against  Fleury's 
L— 3 


34  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 

will.  But  France  could  hardly  in  those  days  stand  idly 
by  and  see  Stanislas  Leszczynska,  the  French  king's 
father-in-law,  beaten  rudely  out  of  Warsaw  by  Augus- 
tus III.  and  the  Russians.  The  war,  which,  like  all  wars 
at  that  time,  raged  in  ever  so  many  places  at  the  same 
time,  came  to  an  end  honorably  and  advantageously  for 
France  with  the  treaty  of  Vienna  in  1738,  and  landed 
Stanislas  Leszczynska,  not  again  on  the  throne  of  Po- 
land, but  comfortably  enough  in  the  duchies  of  Lorraine 
and  Bar.  To  the  despair  of  a  peaceful  minister,  how- 
ever, war  blazed  out  again  in  1740;  the  European  pow- 
ers were  all  wrangling  together  like  boys  at  a  muss,  and 
France  got  very  much  the  worst  of  it.  A  picturesque 
young  Archduchess  of  Austria,  hardly  pressed,  set  Hun- 
gary aflame  with  enthusiasm  at  Presburg.  "  Moriamur 
pro  Rege  nostr'a !"  became  an  historical  phrase,  and  a 
crippled  French  army  found  itself  in  hot  retreat  from 
Prague  to  the  French  frontier  in  the  January  of  1743. 
This  retreat  was  as  fatal  to  Fleury  as  Austerlitz  was 
yet  to  be  to  Pitt.  Old,  broken,  despairing,  he  died  at 
Issy  on  January  29,  1743.  He  was  ninety  years  old  ; 
he  had  done  his  best  for  himself,  and  after  himself  for 
France ;  a  better,  stronger,  wiser  man  than  he  could 
scarcely  have  saved  her  under  the  conditions  of  the 
game ;  he  left  her  in  the  hands  of  a  young  king  of  whom 
the  country  and  the  world  as  yet  knew  little,  of  whom 
the  country  and  the  world  was  soon  to  know  a  great 
deal.  From  this  point  onwards  the  state  drifts  steadily 
from  shame  to  shame  towards  its  doom ;  we  stand  upon 
the  threshold  of  the  most  disastrous,  the  most  degraded 
period  in  the  history  of  France. 

The  little  that  was  known  about  the  young  king  was 
not  much  to  his  credit.  He  had  already  disgraced  him- 
self as  a  husband  by  his  brutal  indifference  to  his  wife 


1743.  MADAME  DE  CHlTEAUROUX.  35 

and  by  his  more  than  Oriental  extravagance  of  desires. 
Already  he  was  remarkable  for  his  mistresses.  He  had 
honored  one  stately  family,  the  family  of  Nesle,  by 
choosing  in  succession  no  less  than  four  daughters  of 
its  house  to  be  his  mistresses.  Of  these  four  mistresses, 
the  latest  was  Madame  de  Chateauroux,  youngest  and 
fairest  of  the  four  sisters,  who  was  in  the  full  noon- 
tide of  her  effulgence  when  battered  old  Fleury  gave 
up  his  cunning  and  died.  She  was  the  real  influence 
in  the  state.  Chancellor  D'Aguesseau,  Marine  Min- 
ister Maurepas,  War  Minister  D'Argenson,  and  Car- 
dinal Tencin  recognized  and  submitted  to  her  authority 
over  the  young,  indolent,  sensual  king.  Madame  de 
Chateauroux,  to  do  her  justice,  does  seem  to  have  tried 
her  best  to  make  something  more  like  a  man  and  less 
like  a  hog  out  of  her  Louis.  She  urged  him  to  play  a 
bold  part  in  facing  the  foes  who  were  now  combining 
against  France.  England  was  now  actively  helping 
Maria  Theresa;  Prussia  was  sated  in  neutrality  by  the 
confirmation  of  stolen  Silesia;  Naples  and  Sardinia, 
under  English  influence,  withdrew  from  coalition  with 
France,  who  thus  found  herself  alone.  The  desperate 
defeat  of  Dettingen  in  1743  occasioned  more  enthusiasm 
than  it  deserved  in  the  capitals  of  London  and  Vienna. 
The  next  year  an  event  of  much  greater  moment  nearly 
came  to  pass.  Louis  XV.,  travelling  with  his  army  like 
an  opera  king  of  cooks  and  lackeys,  was  suddenly  struck 
down  by  malignant  fever  at  Metz,  and  nearly  given 
over.  But  he  did  recover  ;  the  influence  of  his  evil 
star  was  not  yet  exhausted.  Louis,  always  easily  in- 
fluenced by  theories  of  religious  or  ethical  decorum 
while  he  was  in  bad  health,  consented  to  become  recon- 
ciled with  his  unhappy  wife,  and  to  whistle  his  beau- 
tiful, ambitious  mistress  down  the  wind.  Perhaps  the 


36  THE  FRENCH  KEVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 

indolent  voluptuary  was  getting  a  little  tired  of  a  mis- 
tress so  proud,  so  impetuous,  so  eager  to  make  something 
manly  out  of  her  languid  monarch  as  Madame  de  Cha- 
teauroux.  Anyhow,  she  was  banished,  and  Louis  saw 
her  no  more.  Louis's  rescue  from  the  jaws  of  death 
seems  to  have  aroused  a  good  deal  of  misplaced  enthu- 
siasm among  his  subjects.  The  title  of  "  Well-beloved  " 
was  conferred  upon  him  by  popular  sentiment,  a  good 
deal,  it  would  seem,  to  the  monarch's  own  surprise. 
"  What  have  I  done  that  my  people  should  love  me  so 
much?"  he  is  reported  to  have  said — perhaps  in  good 
faith,  more  likely  with  the  queer  cynical  irony  which 
was  a  characteristic  of  his  fatal  nature. 

Though  the  death  of  the  emperor  Charles  VII.  in  the 
January  of  1745,  and  the  terms  to  which  the  new  elector 
of  Bavaria  came  with  Maria  Theresa,  removed  all  reason 
for  continuing  it,  the  war  still  raged  until  Fontenoy 
gave,  in  the  May  of  1745,  the  signal  for  a  series  of 
French  victories  which  ended  in  the  treaty  of  Aix-la- 
Chapelle. 

It  might  be  very  reasonably  maintained  that  the  first 
serious  impetus  in  that  downward  movement  which  cul- 
minated in  the  culbute  generate  was  given  by  the  treaty 
of  Aix-la-Chapelle.  If  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  had 
ended  before  1748,  it  would  have  been,  as  kings  and 
reigns  went  in  those  days,  a  not  inglorious  reign.  Un- 
der the  ministership  of  Fleury  the  prestige  of  France 
was  kept  to  something  like  the  standard  of  the  spacious 
days  of  the  Sun-king,  and  Louis  XV.  himself,  with  his 
fine  new  title  of  the  Well-beloved  hot  upon  him,  had 
not  yet,  by  his  private  debaucheries,  eclipsed  the  degra- 
dation of  the  Regency.  In  1748  France  was  a  great 
and  powerful  kingdom,  victorious  in  arms  all  over  Eu- 
rope, with  a  growing  empire  in  India,  a  growing  empire 


1748.  TREATY  OF  AIX-LA-CHAPELLE.  37 

in  America,  with  a  roll-call  of  victories  as  brilliant  as 
any  that  followed  the  fortunes  of  the  marshals  of  Louis 
XIV.  Before  the  genius  of  Saxe,  the  armies  of  England 
had  been  driven  in  defeat  at  Fontenoy  and  at  Lauffeld; 
before  the  genius  of  Dupleix  the  navy  of  England  had 
retreated  in  despair  from  Pondicherry  ;  the  siege  of 
Maestricht  was  the  last  word  of  a  long  and  glorious 
catalogue  of  triumphs.  But  the  treaty  of  Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle  afforded  France  no  reward  for  her  long  and  suc- 
cessful struggle.  "  I  wish,"  said  Louis  the  Well-beloved, 
"  to  negotiate  like  a  prince  and  not  like  a  merchant," 
and  he  made  practically  no  terms  for  France  in  the 
treaty.  Glory  was  enough  for  Saxe  and  his  generals, 
the  reflected  glory  was  enough  for  the  Well-beloved 
and  the  lords  and  ladies  of  the  Bull's  Eye  ;  but  to  that 
vast  France  of  which  nobody  took  any  heed,  and  which 
was  composed  of  quite  others  than  lords  and  ladies, 
marshals  and  generals,  and  well -beloved  kings,  glory 
was  but  a  barren  business.  The  national  debt  was  enor- 
mously increased ;  the  fighting  strength  of  the  country 
had  been  reduced  by  victories  only  less  fatal  than  de- 
feats, commerce  shattered,  the  navy  weakened;  and  for 
all  these  there  was  nothing  to  show  except  the  gilded 
record  of  some  bloody  and  triumphant  battles.  Hungry 
France,  thirsty  France,  trouserless  France,  might  have 
felt  a  more  appreciable  affection  for  a  king  who  had  a 
touch  more  of  the  merchant  in  his  composition,  might 
have  felt  a  keener  sympathy  for  the  kingly  institution 
if  it  had  known  a  little  better  how  to  combine  the  dig- 
nity of  its  high  office  with  something  of  that  business- 
like common-sense  which,  in  the  opinion  of  Louis,  set 
merchants  apart  from  and  beneath  princes.  France  got 
nothing  by  the  treaty  of  Aix-la-Chapelle,  and  from  the 
moment  of  the  treaty  of  Aix-la-Chapelle,  France,  or 


38  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  III. 

rather  the  French  monarchy,  began  to  go  down  the  hill. 
The  twenty  -  six  years  in  which,  by  the  ordinance  of 
Providence,  Louis  XV.  was  still  permitted  to  reign  over 
France,  were  years  of  deepening  degradation  for  the 
monarchy,  of  deepening  misfortune  for  the  country  and 
its  people. 


1781.  THE  L1TERAKY  MOVEMENT.  39 


CHAPTER   IV. 

THE     PHILOSOPHES. 

WHILE  France  was  slipping  faster  and  faster  on  its 
glacier  descent  to  destruction,  while  a  young  king  was 
growing  older  without  growing  wiser  or  better,  or  at 
all  more  serviceable  to  the  state,  a  movement  was  tak- 
ing place  in  literature  which  was  destined  to  have  the 
most  momentous  results.  While  Jansenist  and  Jesuit 
plucked  at  each  other's  throats,  while  the  king  occupied 
his  ignoble  life  by  selecting  mistresses  with  the  gravity 
of  a  grand  signior  and  the  sensuality  of  a  satyr,  new 
forces  were  coming  into  play,  whose  influence  in  fer- 
menting the  revolutionary  impulse  is  not  to  be  over- 
estimated. 

"  The  authority  of  the  king  has  dwindled,  and  is 
obeyed  in  no  particular."  So  D'Argenson  could  write 
in  1731  in  the  face  of  the  Jansenist  and  Jesuit  Iliad 
which  was  raging,  and  which  had  for  the  moment  eccen- 
trically erected  the  Paris  Parliament  into  the  champion 
of  popular  rights  against  the  oppressions  of  a  despotic 
ministry.  The  fantastic  and  extraordinary  case  of 
Father  Girard  and  Miss  Cadiere  was  promptly  made 
use  of  as  a  weapon  against  the  Jesuits.  New  and  strange 
allies  were  found  swelling  the  Jansenist  ranks.  A  cer- 
tain number  of  men  were  gradually  drifting  together 
into  a  kind  of  unconscious  alliance,  guided  by  a  common 
sympathy  and  a  common  scepticism.  Certain  men  of 
letters,  certain  philosophers,  certain  thinkers,  were  slow- 


40  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION*.  CH.  IV. 

ly  forming  themselves  into  a  body  destined  to  be  bitterly 
abused,  to  be  accused  of  all  manner  of  crimes,  to  be  mis- 
understood alike  by  their  enemies  and  their  blind  ad- 
mirers, and  to  effect  the  most  comprehensive  changes 
in  thought.  In  the  early  part  of  1 732  a  blow  was  struck 
at  this  loosely  adherent,  scarcely  formed  party  which 
had  considerable  effect  in  causing  it  to  cohere  more 
closely.  A  book  appeared,  which  the  Parliament  con- 
demned to  be  burned  as  dangerous  alike  for  religion  and 
for  the  order  of  civil  society.  The  book  was  the  "  Let- 
ters on  the  English."  The  author  was  one  of  the  most 
popular  men  of  letters,  Voltaire. 

Fran 9013  Marie  Arouet  was  born  at  Chatenay  on  Feb- 
ruary 20,  1694.  So  puny  was  the  child,  so  poorly  fitted 
for  the  struggle  for  life,  that  it  was  feared  at  first  that 
he  could  not  live  at  all,  and  neither  the  excellent  and 
well-to-do  notary,  his  father,  nor  the  keen-witted  mother, 
who  died  when  the  child  was  seven  years  old,  could  have 
ventured  to  dream  of  the  long  life  that  lay  before  the 
frail  creature.  In  1704  he  went  to  the  college  of  Louis- 
le-Grand  to  learn  under  the  Jesuits,  according  to  his 
own  statement,  nothing  worth  the  learning.  From  col- 
lege his  godfather,  the  Abbe  Chateauneuf,  took  the  lad 
into  the  dazzling  society  which  was  soon  to  revolve 
around  the  sinful  splendor  of  Regent  Philip.  Under 
the  guidance  of  Chateauneuf,  under  the  influence  of 
another  abbe,  Chaulieu,  the  young  Voltaire  saw  a  great 
deal  of  life  of  a  brilliant  evil  kind,  and  met  a  great 
many  brilliant  evil  people,  and  a  good  many  who  were 
simply  evil  without  being  brilliant.  Chaulieu  was  a 
very  typical  abbe  of  the  Regency.  A  dainty  rhymer 
of  the  lightest  and  loosest  verses,  a  champion  of  all  the 
obscene  reaction  against  the  severity  of  the  Sun-King's 
setting  days,  the  intimate  of  an  aristocracy  whose  chief 


1694-1715.  AROUET.  41 

ambition  it  was  to  excel  in  corruption  and  to  be  fanci- 
fully original  in  sin,  Chaulieu  was  the  most  amazing 
Mentor  that  young  Telemachus  Arouet  could  have  found 
in  his  voyage  through  Paris.  It  is  scarcely  matter  for 
surprise  that  Arouet  the  father,  that  eminently  respect- 
able notary,  did  not  rejoice  in  the  course  of  his  son's 
conduct  or  the  choice  of  his  friends.  They  were  an  ill- 
assorted  sire  and  son.  They  had  nothing  in  common  ; 
to  Voltaire  the  narrow  respectability  of  his  father  was 
at  once  galling  and  ridiculous  ;  Arouet  the  elder  was 
not  sufficiently  keen-sighted  to  see  that  the  flippant  boy 
who  consorted  with  a  lewd  nobility  was  a  man  of  genius. 
By  way  of  mending  matters  and  forcing  the  blood-horse 
into  the  mule's  mill  walk,  Arouet  the  elder  induced 
Chateauneuf's  diplomatist  brother  to  take  young  Arouet 
with  him  on  a  mission  to  the  Hague.  At  the  Hague, 
Voltaire  fell  desperately  in  love  with  a  young  country- 
woman, a  Mademoiselle  du  Noyer.  Mademoiselle  du 
Noyer  was  the  amiable  daughter  of  a  most  unamiable 
mother  who  drove  a  queer  traffic  in  libels.  Pity  as  well 
as  love  urged  the  young  Arouet  to  hope  to  withdraw 
the  girl  from  such  an  influence.  The  intrigue  was  dis- 
covered, and  the  amorist  was  sent  back  in  disgrace  to 
Paris.  Years  after,  Mademoiselle  du  Noyer  married  a 
Baron  de  Winterfeld,  and  always  cherished  an  affec- 
tionate admiration  for  the  great  man  who  had  been  her 
boyish  lover.  Destiny  did  not  draw  closer  the  relation- 
ships of  father  and  son.  To  please  the  father,  the  son 
studied  law  under  Attorney  Alain  in  Paris,  but  he  hated 
the  legal  trade  and  sought  happiness  in  Caumartin's 
library  at  St.  Ange.  The  advent  of  the  regent  in  1715 
was  hailed  by  the  appearance  of  a  bitter  and  clever 
poem,  "Les  j'ai  vu,"  satirizing  the  condition  of  France 
and  assailing  the  Jesuits.  Voltaire  did  not  write  the 


42  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

poem,  but  the  authorities  thought  that  he  did,  and  sent 
him  to  the  Bastille  to  reflect  for  nearly  a  year  upon  the 
dangers  of  dissatisfaction  with  things  as  they  were  in 
France.  In  the  Bastille  he  worked  hard  mentally,  for 
it  seems  he  was  not  allowed  ink  and  paper — finishing 
his  "  Oedipus,"  which  was  played  with  success  shortly 
after  his  release,  and  in  planning  the  "  Henriade,"  in 
which  he  hoped  to  succeed  where  Ronsard  had  failed, 
and  give  epicless  France  her  epopee.  The  "Henriade" 
was  to  be  all  that  the  "  Franciade  "  was  not.  For  the 
next  six  years  the  young  Arouet  worked  hard  and  played 
hard,  flitting  hither  and  thither  in  a  passion  for  wander- 
ings, falling  in  and  out  of  love,  writing  much,  reading 
more  in  printed  books  and  the  bigger  book  of  the  world, 
welcome  in  the  bravest  society,  rejoicing  in  his  own 
youth,  wit,  and  ambition,  hating  Paris  and  loving  the 
country  with  a  passion  that  seems  exotic  and  old  world 
in  eighteenth-century  France.  Arouet  the  elder  died  in 
1722,  as  bitter  against  his  shining,  stubborn  son  as  ever, 
and  with  his  death  Arouet  the  younger  also  fades  from 
knowledge,  and  in  his  place  the  world  has  to  accept  a 
young  Voltaire.  Where  the  name  Voltaire  came  from, 
why  he  chose  it,  and  what  it  signified  to  him  or  to  oth- 
ers, is  and  must  remain  a  mystery.  It  has  been  puzzled 
over,  guessed  at,  reasoned  upon  ;  it  is  really  not  of  the 
slightest  importance.  It  may  be,  as  has  been  ingeniously 
suggested,  compounded  of  an  anagram  upon  his  name 
of  Arouet  with  the  "U"  converted  to  a  "V"  and  the 
initial  letters  of  the  words  "  Le  Jeune  "  pressed  into  the 
service  to  make  up  the  sum.  The  new  name  was  soon 
to  be  better  known  than  the  old.  Its  owner  got  into 
the  famous  quarrel  with  an  insolent  bearer  of  the  name 
of  Rohan.  Voltaire  was  wittier  than  Rohan  ;  Rohan 
revenged  himself  through  the  cudgels  of  his  lackeys. 


1726.  VOLTAIRE  IX  ENGLAND.  43 

Voltaire,  as  bitter  as  creatures  physically  slight  and 
weak  may  well  be  under  brutality,  applied  himself  with 
passion  to  the  art  of  fencing,  and  challenged  Rohan. 
Rohan  refused  to  fight,  but  through  the  influence  of  his 
family  he  got  Voltaire  sent  for  the  second  time  to  the 
Bastille.  There  he  suffered  for  six  months ;  when  he 
was  at  length  released  he  was  immediately  ordered  to 
leave  Paris.  In  the  May  of  1726  Voltaire  arrived  in 
England. 

England  was  at  that  time  and  for  long  after  a  kind 
of  Mecca  to  Continental  lovers  of  liberty  of  thought  and 
action.  Frederick  the  Great  paid,  in  his  "Memoirs," 
his  tribute  to  the  great  men,  such  as  Hobbes,  Collins, 
Shaftesbury,  and  Bolingbroke,  who,  in  his  eyes,  had 
done  so  much  to  widen  thought.  "The  freedom  of 
opinion,"  he  wrote,  "prevalent  in  England  contributed 
greatly  to  the  progress  of  philosophy."  All  manner  of 
Frenchmen,  from  Raynal  to  Roland,  from  Montesquieu 
to  Marat,  visited  it  during  the  golden  prime  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  ;  Voltaire  was  not  the  pioneer.  He  had 
formed  a  friendship  with  Lord  and  Lady  Bolingbroke 
in  France,  and,  when  the  world  was  all  before  him  where 
to  choose,  he  very  naturally  turned  towards  the  country 
of  which  he  had  heard  so  much  from  the  illustrious  St. 
John.  "  Before  Voltaire  became  acquainted  with  Eng- 
land through  his  travels  and  his  friendships,"  says  Cousin 
in  his  "  History  of  Philosophy,"  "  he  was  not  Voltaire, 
and  the  eighteenth  century  was  still  undeveloped."  In 
England  he  passed  three  years,  which  were  years  full 
of  admiration  for  the  country,  for  the  freedom  which 
he  admired  when  he  did  not  always  understand  it,  for 
its  men  of  genius  who  were  beginning  to  revolutionize 
thought — its  Newton,  its  Locke,  its  Swift,  its  Addison, 
its  Pope.  He  studied  English  literature  with  something 


44  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

like  appreciation,  though  he  thought  too  highly  of  Ad- 
dison's  "Cato;"  he  studied  English  science,  then  just 
dawning  into  something  like  scientific  methods  ;  he 
studied  English  philosophy,  and  he  studied  English  the- 
ology. Seldom  were  three  years  of  exile  more  indus- 
triously, more  laboriously  employed. 

While  in  England  he  published  his  "  Henriade,"  which 
Lord  Chesterfield,  who  did  not  admire  Homer,  admired, 
and  which  we  may  be  allowed  to  consider  perhaps  the 
dullest  epic  in  the  world.  It  was  well  subscribed  for  ; 
it  laid  the  foundation  of  his  fortune.  After  three  years 
he  came  back  to  France  and  his  most  famous  love-affair 
with  Madame  du  Chatelet.  He  was  happy  in  a  literary 
life,  producing  successful  plays,  writing  and  planning 
histories,  when  the  "  Lettres  sur  les  Anglais  "  saw  the 
light.  They  do  not  seem  very  terrible  to-day,  they  did 
not  seem  terrible  in  a  little  while  even  to  his  enemies, 
but  the  Parliament  had  them  burned,  and  the  Parliament 
prepared  to  level  a  lettre  de  cachet  at  the  head  of  their 
author.  Voltaire  dreaded  the  Bastille  ;  he  would  prob- 
ably have  returned  to  P^ngland  if  it  had  not  been  for 
'Madame  du  Chatelet's  existence.  In  consequence  of 
Madame  du  Chatelet's  existence  he  retired  to  Cirey,  in 
Champagne,  the  chateau  of  the  Marquis  du  Chatelet — 
there,  with  the  learned  lady  and  her  lord,  livted  six  se- 
cluded years  while  it  was  given  out  that  he  was  in  Eng- 
land. 

Seldom  has  the  service  of  literature  been  obeyed  un- 
der more  curious  conditions.  The  urbane  marquis,  the 
scientific  marquise,  the  philosophic  poet  and  poetic  phi- 
losopher lived  a  life  that  might  not  unfairly  be  called 
eccentric  at  Cirey.  The  gifted  man  and  the  gifted 
woman  were  devoured  by  a  positive  passion  for  work. 
Madame  du  Chatelet  passed  the  major  part  of  the 


1734.  MADAME  DU  CHlTELET.  45 

twenty-four  hours  shut  up  in  her  own  room,  translating 
Newton,  competing  with  Euler,  devoting  all  the  energy 
of  her  fine  intellect  to  the  cause  of  science.  Voltaire 
was  no  less  strenuous,  but  more  catholic,  -condemning 
waste  of  time  as  the  most  unpardonable  of  offences, 
studying  science  with  desperate  eagerness,  writing  his- 
tories, writing  plays,  consumed  by  a  very  demon  of 
work,  and  yet  always  ready  to  play  too  for  the  amuse- 
ment of  stray  guests.  It  cannot  be  said  that  his  life 
lacked  fulness.  At  one  moment  he  was  great  at  magic- 
lanterns  and  puppet-plays,  convulsing  wandering  gen- 
tlewomen by  Puncinella  singing  "  fagnana,  fagnana  ;" 
at  another  he  was  flying  to  Holland  to  avoid  lettres  de 
cachet.  The  influence  of  Madame  du  Chatelet  would 
have  been  unfortunate  if  she  had  succeeded  in  leading 
him  entirely  into  the  service  of  a  sternly  rationalistic 
science.  But  Voltaire  had  the  good  sense  to  feel  doubts 
of  his  capacity  to  shine  as  a  man  of  science,  the  good 
sense  to  submit  those  doubts  to  a  famous  man  of  sci- 
ence, and  the  good  sense  on  finding  those  doubts  con- 
firmed to  accept  the  situation. 

When  Madame  du  Chatelet  died,  Voltaire  declared 
himself  inconsolable.  "  I  have  lost  the  half  of  my  life," 
he  said,  consciously  or  unconsciously  imitating  the  ex- 
quisite tribute  of  Horace  to  Virgil.  He  knew  well 
enough  that  the  gifted  lady  was  no  more  faithful  to 
him  than  she  was  to  her  husband;  the  episode  of  Vol- 
taire and  Chatelet  opening  a  locket  of  hers  after  her 
death  and  finding  that  it  contained  the  portrait  of 
neither  of  them,  but  of  her  lover,  St.  Lambert,  has  been 
worked  upon  in  many  literatures.  Voltaire  was  not  in- 
consolable, however.  It  is  in  one  of  his  own  exquisite 
short  stories  that  he  speaks  of  the  despairing  pair  who, 
in  the  end,  ceased  to  despair  and  raised  together  a  tern- 


46  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

pie  to  Time  the  consoler.  Time  was  always  Voltaire's 
great  consoler.  He  lived  so  long  and  lived  so  thorough- 
ly that  his  keenest  personal  griefs  did  inevitably  fade 
into  a  far  perspective.  Then  came  the  storm  and  stress 
of  the  melancholy  Prussian  period,  when  a  great  king 
and  a  great  writer  behaved  with  the  absurd  incivility 
of  angry  schoolboys  and  converted  a  famous  friendship 
into  a  yet  more  famous  enmity.  Neither  Frederick  the 
Great  nor  Voltaire  comes  well  out  of  the  quarrel.  The 
whole  thing  was  pitiable,  mean,  and  ridiculous,  not  to 
be  willingly  lingered  over.  Then  Voltaire  settled  down 
at  Ferney,  and  made  for  a  long  time  the  little  village 
on  the  Swiss  lake  the  Mecca  of  the  philosophic  thought 
of  Europe. 

It  was  from  Ferney  that  Voltaire  fulminated  all  those 
thunders  against  the  "Infamous"  which  have  earned 
for  him  an  exaggerated  censure  and  an  exaggerated 
praise.  It  was  while  at  Ferney  that  he  gave  most 
strenuous  expression  to  that  "fierce  indignation,"  that 
saeva  indignatio,  which  harassed  his  spirit  all  his  life 
very  much  as  it  harassed  the  spirit  of  Jonathan  Swift. 
To  Ferney  came  men  from  all  parts  of  the  world  to  visit 
the  great  writer — the  great  James  Boswell,  of  Auchin- 
leck,  for  one;  Dr.  Burney,  for  another.  It  was  at  Fer- 
ney that  that  most  amazing"  scoundrel  and  liar,  Jacques 
Casanova,  had  those  interviews  with  Voltaire  which  he 
records  in  those  astonishing  volumes  in  which  a  kind 
of  grotesque  satyriasis  alternates  with  shrewd  and  en- 
tertaining judgments  upon  men  and  things.  If  it  were 
ever  possible  to  take  Casanova's  statements  at  the  foot 
of  the  letter,  it  would  be  amusing  to  accept  as  in  some 
degree  truthful  his  account  of  his  arguments  with  Vol- 
taire over  the  respective  merits  of  "Merlin  Coccaie" 
and  the  "Pucelle."  But  especially  it  was  to  Ferney 


1762.  VOLTAIRE'S   SATIRICAL   TRIUMPHS.  47 

that  the  minds  and  thoughts  turned  of  that  body  of 
men  who  were  destined  to  make  the  epoch  of  the  Pom- 
padour illustrious  and  the  French  Revolution  possible 
— the  Encyclopaedists  Diderot,  D'Alembert,  D'Holbach, 
Helvetius,  and  Grimm. 

In  his  own  mind  Voltaire  looked  for  fame  to  his 
longer  works.  To  me,  however,  Voltaire's  happiest  style 
is  to  be  seen  in  his  short  stories.  His  capacity  for  pro- 
ducing effective  and  precious  trifles  was,  as  has  been 
said  in  words  which  I  may  adopt  and  adapt,  some- 
thing wonderful  —  not  mere  curiosities,  but  condensed 
triumphs  of  genuine  satire,  whose  meaning  grows  and 
deepens  as  they  are  studied.  What,  for  instance,  can 
surpass  the  concise  humor  of  "  Scarmentado's  Travels  "  ? 
Or  "The  Blind  Judges  of  Colors,"  with  its  whimsical 
conclusion,  in  which,  after  the  recital  of  all  the  quar- 
rels and  battles  which  took  place  among  the  blind  dis- 
putants, each  of  whom  claimed  to  be  an  infallible  judge 
of  colors,  we  are  gravely  told  that  a  deaf  man  who  had 
read  the  tale  admitted  the  folly  of  the  sightless  men 
in  presuming  to  decide  questions  of  color,  but  stoutly 
maintained  that  deaf  men  were  the  only  qualified  musi- 
cal critics  ?  Or  "  Bababec  and  the  P"akirs  "  ?  A  Mussul- 
man, who  is  the  supposed  narrator  of  the  tale,  and  a 
good  Brahmin,  Omri,  visit  the  fakir  groups  by  the 
banks  of  the  Ganges,  at  Benares.  Some  of  these  holy 
men  are  dancing  on  their  heads;  some  inserting  nails 
in  their  flesh;  some  staring  fixedly  at  the  tips  of  their 
noses,  in  the  belief  that  they  thus  will  see  the  celestial 
light.  One,  named  Bababec,  is  revered  for  special  sanc- 
tity because  he  went  naked,  wore  a  huge  chain  round 
his  neck,  and  sat  upon  pointed  nails,  which  pierced  his 
flesh.  Omri  consults  this  saintly  sage  as  to  his  own 
chances  of  reaching  Brahma's  abode  after  death.  The 


48  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

fakir  asks  him  how  he  regulates  his  life.  "  I  endeavor," 
says  Omri,  "  to  be  a  good  citizen,  a  good  husband,  a 
good  father,  and  a  good  friend.  I  lend  money  without 
interest  to  those  who  have  need;  I  give  to  the  poor, 
and  I  maintain  peace  among  my  neighbors."  "I  am 
sorry  for  you,"  interrupts  the  pious  fakir;  "your  case 
is  hopeless;  you  never  put  nails  dans  votre  cul."  Such 
specimens,  however,  are  only  like  the  brick  which  the 
dullard  in  the  old  story  brought  away  for  the  purpose 
of  giving  his  friend  an  idea  of  the  beauty  of  the  temple. 
The  seeds  of  the  Revolution  were  nowhere  more  surely 
sown  than  in  these  short  stories.  Voltaire  developed 
the  satirical  capability  of  the  French  language  to  a  de- 
gree equalled  by  no  other  man.  So  much  sarcastic  force 
was,  probably,  never  compressed  into  so  few  and  such 
simple  words  as  in  many  of  these  little  fictions.  The 
reader  is  positively  amazed  at  the  easy  dexterity  with 
which  subjects  are  placed  in  the  most  ludicrous  light 
possible.  Sometimes  Voltaire's  ideas  become  extrava- 
gant, but  his  style  never  does.  Sydney  Smith  frequent- 
ly lacks  simplicity,  but  Voltaire  is  always  simple  and 
never  strains.  What  an  admirable  pamphleteer  Vol- 
taire would  have  made  had  he  but  been  an  Englishman  ! 
What  inextinguishable  ridicule  he  would  have  scattered 
over  a  ministry  or  over  an  opposition !  How  irresisti- 
bly people  would  have  been  forced  to  think  anything 
he  laughed  at  deserving  of  laughter!  How  he  would 
have  written  up  some  measure  of  emancipation  and 
made  a  reluctant  government  afraid  to  refuse  it !  That 
Voltaire  appreciated  English  freedom  of  speech  we  have 
already  seen.  Had  he  but  understood  the  genius  and 
the  worth  of  our  best  literature  as  well,  it  would  have 
been  better  for  his  critical,  and  perhaps  for  his  dramatic 
fame.  Voltaire,  of  course,  made  fun  of  English  ways 


1694-1778.  VOLTAIRE'S   USE   OF  SATIRE.  49 

now  and  then.  My  Lord  Qu'importe,  or  What -then, 
who  said  nothing  but  "  How  d'ye  do  "  at  quarter-hour 
intervals,  is  the  prototype  of  many  a  caricature  drawn 
by  succeeding  hands.  But  in  the  very  chapter  which 
contained  this  good-humored  hit  at  our  proverbial  in- 
sular taciturnity,  he  calls  the  English  the  most  perfect 
government  in  the  world,  and  adds,  with  a  truth  which 
prevails  at  this  day  as  much  as  ever,  "  There  are,  indeed, 
always  two  parties  in  England  who  fight  with  the  pen 
and  with  intrigue,  but  they  invariably  unite  when  there 
is  need  to  take  up  arms  to  defend  their  country  and 
their  liberty."  Well  might  Goldsmith,  in  his  "  Citizen 
of  the  World,"  well  might  Disraeli,  in  "  Contarini  Flem- 
ing," pay  their  tributes  in  turn  as  Englishmen  to  the 
genius  of  Voltaire. 

A  noble  weapon  was  that  Voltaire  owned,  for  one 
who  used  it  rightly — who  understood,  as  Sydney  Smith 
said,  how  to  value  and  how  to  despise  it.  It  would  be 
idle  to  deny  that  Voltaire  sometimes  used  it  unfairly. 
Fantastic,  hot  -  tempered,  sensitive,  spiteful  by  nature, 
how  could  such  a  man  have  such  a  stiletto  always  un- 
sheathed, and  not  sometimes  give  a  jealous  stab,  and 
sometimes  thrust  too  deeply,  and  sometimes  wound  those 
who  were  not  worth  piercing  at  all  ?  He  often  imported 
petty  personal  spleens  into  his  satires,  and  used  his 
giant's  strength  upon  some  poor  ephemeral  pigmy,  some 
Freron  or  some  Boyer.  But  so  did  Horace,  and  Pope, 
and  Swift,  and  so  did  Thackeray  even  in  later  and  milder 
days.  Voltaire  has  got  a  worse  name  for  meanness  of 
this  kind  than  almost  any  other  man  of  kindred  genius, 
and  yet  seems,  after  all,  to  deserve  it  less  than  most  of 
the  great  satirists  of  the  world.  Indeed,  posterity  has, 
upon  the  whole,  dealt  very  harshly  with  Voltaire's  errors, 
and  made  scant  allowance  of  the  praise  which  his  pur- 
I.— 4 


50  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

poses  and  efforts  so  often  deserved.  Few  of  the  lead- 
ing satirists  of  literature  ever  so  consistently  and,  all 
things  considered,  so  boldly  turned  their  points  against 
that  which  deserved  to  be  wounded.  Religious  intol- 
erance and  religious  hypocrisy,  the  crying  sins  of  France 
in  Voltaire's  day,  were  the  steady  objects  of  his  satire. 
Where,  in  these  stories,  at  least,  does  he  attempt  to  sat- 
irize religion?  Where  does  he  make  a  gibe  of  genuine 
human  affection?  Where  does  he  sneer  at  an  honest 
effort  to  serve  humanity  ?  Where  does  he  wilfully  turn 
his  face  from  the  truth  ?  Calmly  surveying  these  mar- 
vellous satirical  novels,  the  unprejudiced  reader  will 
search  in  vain  for  the  blasphemy  and  impiety  with 
which  so  many  well  -  meaning  people  have  charged 
the  fictions  of  Voltaire.  Where  is  the  blasphemy  in 
"Zadig"?  It  is  brimful  of  satire  against  fickle  wives 
and  false  friends,  intriguing  courtiers,  weak  beings,  in- 
tolerant ecclesiastics,  and  many  other  personages  toler- 
ably well  known  in  France  at  that  day.  They  might 
naturally  complain  of  blasphemy  who  believed  them- 
selves included  in  the  description  of  the  learned  Magi 
who  doomed  Zadig  to  be  impaled  for  his  heretical  doc- 
trines concerning  the  existence  of  griffins.  "No  one 
was  impaled  after  all,  whereupon  many  wise  doctors 
murmured  and  presaged  the  speedy  downfall  of  Baby- 
lon," was  a  sentence  which  probably  many  in  Paris 
thought  exceedingly  offensive  and  impious.  Possibly 
yet  greater  offence  was  conveyed  to  many  minds  by 
Zadig's  famous  candle  argument.  Zadig,  having  been 
sold  into  slavery,  fell  into  the  hands  of  a  very  humane 
and  rational  merchant,  named  Setoc.  "  He  discovered 
in  his  master  a  natural  tendency  to  good,  and  much 
clear  sense.  He  was  sorry  to  observe,  however,  that 
Setoc  adored  the  sun,  moon,  and  stars,  according  to  the 


J  6  94-1778.        OBJECTS  OF  VOLTAIRE'S  SATIRE.  51 

ancient  usage  of  Araby.  .  .  .  One  evening  Zadig  lit  a 
great  number  of  flambeaux  in  the  tent,  and,  when  his' 
patron  appeared,  flung  himself  on  his  knees  before  the 
illuminated  wax,  exclaiming,  'Eternal  and  brilliant 
lights,  be  always  propitious  to  me  !'  '  What  are'  you 
doing?'  asked  Setoc,  in  amazement.  'I  am  doing  as 
you  do,'  replied  Zadig.  '  I  adore  the  lamps  and  I  neg- 
lect their  maker  and  mine.'  Setoc  comprehended  the 
profound  sense  of  this  illustration.  The  wisdom  of  his 
slave  entered  his  soul;  he  lavished  his  incense  no  more 
upon  created  things,  but  adored  the  Eternal  Being  who 
made  them  all."  Is  it  impious  to  satirize  the  glory  of 
war,  the  levity  of  French  society,  the  practice  of  bury- 
ing the  dead  in  close  churchyards  in  the  midst  of  cities, 
the  venal  disposal  of  legal  and  military  offices?  All 
these  are  subjects  on  which  the  author  pours  out  his 
gall  in  the  "  Vision  of  Babouc."  The  travels  of  Scar- 
mentado  simply  expose  religious  intolerance  in  France, 
Spain,  England,  Italy,  Holland,  China.  The  letters  of 
Amabed  denounce  fanaticism  coupled  with  profligacy. 
Anything  said  against  the  manner  in  which  the  vices 
of  Fa  Tutto  are  exposed  must  apply  equally  to  Aristoph- 
anes and  Juvenal,  to  Rabelais  and  Swift,  to  Marlowe 
and  Massinger.  The  "  Histoiy  of  Jenni "  is  a  very 
humdrum  argumentation  against  atheism;  inefficacious, 
we  fear,  to  convert  very  hardened  infidels,  and  serving 
only  to  demonstrate  the  author's  good  intentions  and 
his  incapacity  for  theological  controversy.  "  The  White 
Bull,"  if  it  have  any  meaning  whatever  beyond  that  of 
any  of  Anthony  Hamilton's  fairy  tales,  means  to  satirize 
the  literal  interpretations  of  certain  portions  of  the  Old 
Testament  in  which  very  stupid  theologians  delighted. 
To  accuse  of  blasphemy  every  man  who  refused  to  ac- 
cept the  interpretations  which  Voltaire  in  this  extrava- 


52  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

gant  parable  appears  to  reject,  would  be  to  affix  the 
charge  upon  some  of  the  profoundest  of  our  own  theo- 
logians, some  of  the  best  and  wisest  of  our  thinkers.  It 
is  unquestionable  that  Voltaire  was  deficient  in  that 
quality  which  we  call  veneration.  He  had  no  respect 
even  for  what  Carlyle  terms  the  "majesty  of  custom." 
With  all  his  hatred  of  intolerance,  he  was  himself  sin- 
gularly intolerant  of  error.  He  did  not  care  to  concil- 
iate the  feelings  of  those  whose  logical  inaccuracy  he 
ridiculed.  Frequently  and  grievously  he  sinned  against 
good  taste,  against  that  kindly,  manly  feeling  which 
prompts  a  gentle  mode  of  pointing  out  a  fellow-man's 
errors  and  follies.  But  there  is  nothing  in  these  stories, 
at  least,  which  affords  any  real  foundation  for  a  charge 
of  blasphemy  or  wilful  impiety  ;  and  these  volumes, 
more  truly  and  faithfully  than  anything  else  which  re- 
mains of  him,  reflect  to  posterity  the  real  character  and 
spirit,  the  head  and  heart  of  Voltaire.  In  these  we 
learn  what  Voltaire  thought  deserving  of  ridicule;  and 
with  that  knowledge,  on  the  great  German's  principle, 
we  come  to  know  the  man  himself. 

What  is  the  moral  of  all  these  satires  ?  Voltaire  gave 
them  to  the  world  with  a  moral  purpose,  and,  indeed, 
marred  the  artistic  effect  of  many  of  them  by  the  reso- 
lute adherence  with  which  he  clung  to  it.  Do  they 
teach  anything  but  that  truth,  unselfishness,  genuine 
religious  feeling,  freedom,  and  love,  are  the  good  an- 
gels of  humanity  ;  and  falsehood,  selfishness,  hypocrisy, 
intolerance,  and  lawless  passion,  its  enemies  and  its 
curses?  Why  accept  Juvenal  as  a  moral  teacher  and 
reject  Voltaire?  Why  affix  to  the  name  of  Voltaire  a 
stigma  no  one  now  applies  to  that  of  Rabelais  ?  Voltaire 
mocked  at  certain  religious  teaching,  unquestionably ; 
and  it  is  not,  under  ordinary  circumstances,  amiable  or 


1694-1778.         VOLTAIRE'S  SATIRE  JUSTIFIED.       .  53 

creditable  to  find  food  for  satire  in  the  religious  cere- 
monials or  professions  of  any  man.  To  do  so  now  would 
be  inexcusable,  because  it  would  be  wholly  unnecessary. 
Where  each  man  has  full  and  equal  freedom  to  preach, 
pray,  and  profess  what  he  pleases,  nothing  but  malig- 
nity or  vulgarity  can  prompt  any  one  to  make  a  public 
gibe  of  his  neighbor's  ceremonials  of  worship,  even  al- 
though his  neighbor's  moral  practices  may  appear  some- 
what inconsistent  with  true  worship  of  any  kind.  To 
satirize  the  practices  or  doctrines  of  the  established 
church  of  any  civilized  country  now  argues  not  cour- 
age, but  sheer  impertinence  and  vulgarity.  But  things 
were  very  different  when  Voltaire  wrote.  Where  it 
might  entail  banishment,  worldly  ruin,  or  even  death, 
to  speak  a  free  word  of  criticism  upon  the  doings  of 
the  hierophants  of  a  dominant  authority,  it  was  a  very 
excusable  and  praiseworthy  act  to  expose  the  folly  of 
some  of  the  deeds,  the  inconsistency  and  immorality  of 
some  of  the  teachers.  It  is  more  easy  to  pardon  this 
than  to  pardon  the  "Pucelle,"  that  brilliant,  indecent 
burlesque  of  Chapelain's  solemn  muse  which  Richelieu 
suggested,  which  Malesherbes  adored,  which  its  author 
affectionately  called  "  Ma  Jeanne,"  which  the  yet  to  be 
famous'author  of  "Organt"  desperately  imitated.  The 
"Pucelle"  is  as  unjustifiable  to-day  as  when  Voltaire 
wrote  it ;  the  stories  no  longer  need  to  be  justified. 

Gessler  may  wear  his  hat  any  fashion  he  chooses,  and 
only  ill-breeding  would  laugh  at  him  as  long  as  he  does 
not  insist  upon  any  one  performing  any  act  of  homage 
to  his  humor.  But  when  he  sets  his  beaver  upon  a  pole 
in  the  centre  of  the  market-place,  and  orders  imprison- 
ment or  exile  for  every  subject  who  will  not  fall  down 
and  worship  it,  that  man  does  a  brave  and  wise  act  who 
Bets  the  world  laughing  at  the  tyrant  and  his  prepos- 


54  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

terous  aiTOgance.  The  personages  who  used  to  sing 
comic  songs  and  dance  the  clog-dance  during  certain 
performances  of  divine  service  several  years  ago  were 
vulgar  and  culpable  boors.  Whatever  they  might  have 
thought  of  the  service,  they  were  not  compelled  to  at- 
tend it,  and  in  our  days  theological  differences  are  not 
decided  by  mobs  and  hob-nailed  shoes.  But  if  the  in- 
cumbent of  the  church  had  the  power  to  bring  down 
penal  disqualification,  or  exile,  or  worldly  ruin  upon  the 
heads  of  all  those  who  declined  to  acknowledge  his  cere- 
monials as  their  worship,  the  first  man  who  raised  a  bold 
laugh  at  the  whole  performance  might  be  very  justly 
regarded  as  a  hero.  Something,  at  least,  of  this  quali- 
fied character  is  to  be  said  in  palliation  of  the  irrever- 
ence of  Voltaire.  Much  that  was  stigmatized  as  blas- 
phemy a  century  ago,  most  people  regard  as  plain  truth 
now.  Much  even  of  the  most  objectionable  of  Voltaire's 
writings  may  be  excused  by  the  circumstances  of  the 
time,  by  the  feelings  with  which  he  wrote,  by  the  dis- 
torted and  hideous  form  in  which  Christianity  was  pre- 
sented in  the  dogmas  of  so  many  of  its  professional 
exponents.  Much,  it  is  true,  may  be  admitted  to  be 
wholly  inexcusable,  for  did  he  not  produce  the  "Pu- 
celle"?  But  no  one  claims  for  Voltaire  an  immunity 
from  some  severe  censure.  All  that  is  sought  for  him 
is  a  more  general  and  generous  recognition  of  the  praise 
he  merited  and  the  motives  which  impelled  him,  a  miti- 
gation of  the  sentence  which  so  many  have  pronounced 
upon  him.  No  other  man  from  Voltaire's  birth  down- 
wards, not  even  excepting  Rousseau,  has  borne  such 
extravagance  of  praise  followed  by  such  a  load  of  ob- 
loquy. He  was  not  a  profound  thinker ;  he  was  not  a 
hero ;  he  was  not  a  martyr  for  truth ;  he  was  not  a 
blameless  man.  But  he  had,  at  least,  half-glimpses  of 


1694-1778.          VOLTAIRE'S  GREAT  INFLUENCE.  55 

many  truths,  not  of  his  own  time,  which  the  world  has 
recognized  and  acknowledged  since.  He  had  probably 
as  much  of  the  heroic  in  him  as  a  man  constitutionally 
nervous  and  timid  could  well  be  expected  to  have.  No 
one  would  ever  have  relished  less  the  endurance  of  the 
martyr's  sufferings  in  his  own  person,  but  he  made 
odious  and  despicable  those  who  had  caused  or  con- 
nived at  their  infliction  upon  others,  and  he  did  some- 
thing to  render  future  martyrdoms  impossible.  For 
his  time  and  his  temptations,  his  personal  offences  were 
not  very  many  or  very  great.  If  people  would  but 
cease  to  think  of  him  as  a  philosopher  either  of  free- 
thought  or  of  infidelity,  and  would  merely  regard  him 
as  a  political  and  social  satirist,  they  would  recognize 
in  bis  satirical  works,  not  only  the  memorials  of  a  ge- 
nius unrivalled  in  its  own  path,  but  the  evidences  of  a 
generous  nature,  an  enlightened  perception,  and  an  earn- 
est desire  for  the  happiness  and  the  progress  of  human 
beings. 

With  these  words  we  must  take  our  farewell  of  Vol- 
taire. Never  was  there  a  greater  force  in  literature  ; 
never  has  a  man  been  more  wildly  worshipped  or  more 
wildly  execrated.  His  bitterest  enemies  can  afford  to 
think  well  of  the  champion  of  Rochette,  of  Galas  and 
Sirven,  of  La  Barre  and  Lally.  His  greatest  admirers 
may  regret  the  squabble  with  Frederick.  But  the  whole 
life  of  Voltaire  was  one  gallant  fight  for  freedom.  The 
influence  he  obtained  in  his  own  time  was  simply  enor- 
mous, only  rivalled  by  the  enormous  influences  which 
his  name  and  work  have  exercised  since  his  time.  It 
is  impossible  to  read,  without  being  deeply  touched,  of 
that  return  to  Paris  in  1778,  after  an  absence  of  well- 
nigh  a  generation,  of  the  enthusiastic  triumph  accorded 
to  him  by  the  whole  city,  and  of  his  death,  whether 


56  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

from  over-excitement,  or  an  overdose  of  laudanum,  on 
May  30  in  that  same  year.  He  had  waged  a  life-long 
war  against  tyranny,  oppression,  and  injustice  of  all 
kinds  ;  if  he  was  the  great  general  of  the  war,  he  had 
the  good-fortune  to  rally  round  him  the  brilliantest  of 
lieutenants — most  brilliant  of  all,  the  greatest  of  his  dis- 
ciples, Diderot. 

Denis  Diderot  was  born  at  Langres  in  1713,  the  son 
of  a  studious,  intelligent  sword  cutler  and  a  worthy 
woman  ;  he  had  a  "  divine  Diogenes  in  petticoats  "  for 
a  sister  and  a  devout  Jesuit  for  a  brother.  In  his  early 
youth  he  went  to  school  with  the  Jesuits,  and  became 
so  enamoured  of  them  that  he  sought  to  escape  from 
Rome  in  order  to  join  the  order  in  Paris.  His  father 
intercepted  the  escape,  but,  with  wise  indulgence,  took 
him  himself  to  Paris  to  the  College  d'Harcourt.  There 
the  young  Diderot  had  two  years  of  excellent  training  ; 
then  the  father  announced  that  it  was  time  he  should 
begin  the  world,  and  offered  him  his  choice  of  law 
or  medicine.  Denis  Diderot  disliked  both.  Medicine 
seemed  to  him  as  murderous  as  it  seemed  to  Faust ;  law, 
the  intolerable  doing  of  other  folks'  business.  Diderot 
senior  thereupon  promptly  and  decisively  cut  off  the 
supplies  and  Denis  found  himself  thrown  on  his  own 
resources.  To  be  thrown  upon  one's  own  resources  in 
a  great  capital  with  much  ambition  for  success  chiefly 
of  the  literary  kind,  and  no  money  wherewith  to  insure 
bed  and  board,  is  not  a  very  agreeable  experience  in  the 
present  day,  but  it  was  very  much  more  disagreeable  in 
the  last  century.  The  life  of  a  man  of  letters  who  wished 
to  live  by  his  pen  was  desperate,  uphill  work.  He  was 
often  hungry,  he  was  often  homeless,  his  raiment  often 
scanty,  bis  linen  often  ragged.  He  was  worse  off  than 
the  gypsy,  because  he  would  not  steal ;  he  was  worse 


1713-1784.  DENIS  DIDEROT.  57 

off  than  the  tramp,  because  he  would  not  beg ;  he  was 
worse  off  than  the  laborer,  because  he  was  troubled  by 
the  thoughts,  the  hopes,  the  dreams  which  lifted  him 
from  the  possibility  of  content  in  almost  animal  occu- 
pation and  almost  animal  gratification  of  the  imperious 
desires.  Diderot  was  destined  to  see  the  man  of  letters 
a  man  of  power  in  France ;  but  when  he  first  launched 
his  bark  upon  the  perilous  sea,  the  man  of  letters  was 
hardly  recognized  as  better  than  an  adventurer  or  a 
drudge. 

Diderot  for  the  first  hard  decade  of  his  working  life 
was  both  adventurer  and  drudge.  He  did  some  teach- 
ing, got  a  tutorship  in  the  house  of  a  wealthy  man,  and 
deliberately  gave  it  up  because  it  interfered  with  his 
scheme  of  existence.  He  did  as  much  borrowing  as  he 
could.  The  needy  Bohemians  of  Murger's  immortal 
story  did  not  live  a  more  desperate  life  than  he.  Paris 
is  the  true  Prague  of  Bohemia,  and  Diderot  was  free  of 
the  city.  He  knew  what  it  was  to  starve.  A  kind  land- 
lady once  forced  a  supper  upon  him  when  he  was  almost 
dying  of  hunger.  He  swore  that  if  ever  brighter  hours 
dawned  for  him  he  would  never  refuse  aid  to  any  living 
creature  or  help  to  condemn  him  to  such  misery.  It  is 
pleasant  to  record  that  Diderot  kept  his  oath.  But  the 
time  for  keeping  the  oath  was  far  off.  In  the  meantime 
he  tramped  Paris,  wrote  and  read  and  hungered  and 
thirsted  ;  studied  rather  the  book  of  life  than  books 
about  life  ;  married  in  the  reckless  Bohemian  way  a 
seamstress  named  Antoinette  Champion,  and  made  a 
dismal  match  of  it.  Men  of  genius  are  not  always  the 
pleasantest  companions  for  the  hearth  and  home,  even 
where  the  sordid  claims  of  daily  life  do  not  intrude  and 
disturb.  But  Diderot  was  wretchedly  poor,  and  the 
seamstress  naturally  brought  no  portion  with  her.  She 


58  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

was  full  of  the  domestic  virtues,  pious,  -prudent,  careful. 
But  she  was  rather  older  than  Diderot,  she  could  not 
possibly  understand  him;  in  the  end  his  wild  humors, 
his  infidelities,  wore  out  her  patience  and  the  bond 
galled.  Poor  little  Lenette  in  Jean  Paul  Richter's 
masterpiece  was  much  to  be  pitied  for  marrying  Sieben- 
kaes,  though  Siebenkaes  was  as  moral  as  an  apostle. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  Siebenkaes  was  to  be  pitied  in 
that  he  was  a  man  of  genius  and  a  poet  who  had  mar- 
ried a  mere  Haus-Frau.  We  must  pity  Antoinette 
Champion  ;  we  may  also  pity  Diderot.  He  should  not 
have  married,  he  was  not  meant  for  marriage  ;  he  could 
not  keep  the  compact  he  had  entered  into  ;  he  could 
not  do  without  intellectual  companionship.  Unlucky 
Antoinette  Champion  could  give  him  her  devoted  affec- 
tion, her  untiring  work,  her  poor  hoarded  pence  for  his 
cups  of  coffee,  but  she  could  not  talk  about  the  things 
nearest  and  dearest  to  his  heart,  and  he  inevitably  drift- 
ed off  to  those  who  could.  Who  can  help  pitying  her 
or  blaming  him  ?  To  have  lived  the  life  due  to  his  mar- 
riage would  have  been  suicide  to  Diderot,  but  not  to 
live  it  was  little  short  of  murder — murder  of  the  domes- 
tic hopes,  the  domestic  yearnings,  all  that  made  life 
sweet  to  the  poor  seamstress.  Philosophers  are  often 
bad  house-fellows.  After  all,  we  have  never  heard  Xan- 
tippe's  side  of  the  story. 

For  many  bitter  years  Diderot  toiled  and  drudged  in 
Paris,  doing  all  manner  of  hack  work,  befriending  all 
who  sought  his  friendship,  readily  cheated  and  deceived 
by  all  who  strove  to  cheat  or  to  deceive  him,  translating 
Shaftesbury,  penning  pamphlets,  enduring  domiciliary 
visits  from  the  police,  even  going  to  prison.  A  lampoon 
upon  a  courtly  minion  caused  him  to  be  arrested  and 
sent  to  Vincennes,  where  he  might  have  rotted  to  death 


1713-84.  A  REVOLUTIONARY   PRELUDE.  69 

but  for  the  efforts  of  Voltaire.  In  the  woods  of  Vincen- 
nes  Diderot  was  allowed  to  wander,  while  he  was  still 
nominally  a  prisoner,  in  the  company  of  Rousseau  ;  it 
was  while  he  was  in  Vincennes  that  he  learned  his 
first  sharp  lesson  in  the  infidelity  of  woman.  He  imag- 
ined that  his  new  Egeria,  Madame  de  Puisieux,  would 
at  least  be  true  to  him.  He  strangely  fancied  that  ge- 
nius, wit,  scholarship,  could  bind  a  lewd  woman  to  his 
side.  She  betrayed  him,  while  her  professions  of  love 
and  devotion  were  still  warm  upon  her  lips ;  he  was 
convinced  of  her  treason  and  he  gave  her  up.  It  is  one 
of  the  most  whimsical  curses  which  Nature  inflicts  upon 
such  men,  that  while  they  are  themselves  untrue  they 
expect  to  find  truth  in  others.  Full  of  his  friendship 
for  Rousseau,  whose  flagging  purposes  he  had  animated 
with  his  own  philosophical  fire,  full  of  bitter  reflections 
upon  the  treachery  of  woman's  love,  Diderot  left  Vin- 
cennes a  free  man  after  three  months  of  captivity,  and 
set  himself  with  all  swiftness  to  giving  the  final  touches 
to  the  first  volume  of  the  "  Encyclopaedia." 

Much  is  expected  of  those  who  have  the  fortune  or 
the  misfortune  to  be  called  upon  to  play  their  part  in 
an  epoch  of  transition.  Diderot's  part  was  played  in 
such  a  time  ;  he  was  almost  unconsciously,  but  not  quite 
unconsciously,  preparing  the  way  for  the  Revolution. 
The  whole  social  order  around  him  was  wheeling  swiftly 
into  a  new  orbit,  and  Diderot  put  his  shoulder  to  the 
wheel  with  a  will.  It  is  not  easy  even  for  the  greatest 
of  men  to  be  absolutely  certain  that  they  live  and  move 
in  a  time  of  radical  change,  a  kind  of  grand  climacteric 
of  life  and  order  and  law.  But  Diderot  worked  in  a 
time  when  the  grand  climacteric  of  the  political  and 
social  life  of  France  was  fast  approaching,  and  he  was 
distinctly  conscious  of  the  approaching  change.  What 


60  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

shape  the  change  was  to  take,  how  great,  how  convulsive 
the  change  was  to  be,  he  can  have  hardly  guessed,  but 
he  worked  like  a  hero  in  the  cause  of  change;  any  change 
from  the  condition  of  life,  mental,  social,  political,  in 
which  the  France  of  his  youth  was  set.  How  far  Dide- 
rot was  prepared  to  go,  at  least  in  theory,  we  may  learn 
from  the  passages  which  he  interpolated  into  the  Abbe 
Raynal's  history  of  the  two  Indies.  Take,  for  example, 
this  sentence  :  "  Until  a  king  is  dragged  to  Tyburn 
with  no  more  pomp  than  the  meanest  criminal,  the  people 
will  have  no  conception  of  liberty.  The  law  is  nothing 
unless  it  be  a  sword  suspended  over  all  heads  without 
distinction,  and  levelling  all  which  elevate  themselves 
above  the  horizontal  plane  in  which  it  circles."  No 
wonder  that  Mallet  du  Pan  declared  that  such  sentences 
"serve  as  a  prelude  to  the  revolutionary  code." 

To  an  age  like  ours,  so  rich  in  the  means  it  affords 
to  all  of  knowledge,  so  fertile  in  the  systematization 
and  the  spread  of  information,  it  is  difficult  at  first  to 
realize  the  literary  revolution  which  was  effected  by  the 
appearance  of -the  "Encyclopaedia."  It  was  really  the 
first  of  its  kind,  the  "  Hero  Eponymus  "  of  encyclope- 
dias. There  had  been  encyclopaedias  before,  but  hardly 
in  the  sense  which  is  now,  since  the  days  of  Diderot, 
attached  to  the  word.  If  Albertus  Magnus  made  a  kind 
of  compilation,  if  Vincent  de  Beauvais  wrote  a  "Specu- 
lum," if  Roger  Bacon  in  an  Opus  Majus  set  up  the 
vestibule  to  an  unfinished  temple  of  knowledge,  the 
"  Compendium  Philosophic,"  if  a  Ringelberg  of  Basle  in 
the  sixteenth  century,  and  an  Alsted  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  and  a  Chambers  in  the  eighteenth  century  pub- 
lished cyclopedias,  none  of  these  ventures  could  at  all 
compare  with  the  "vast  operation"  which  Diderot  and 
his  friend  so  gallantly  undertook  and  so  gallantly  car- 


1746.  THE   "ENCYCLOPAEDIA."  61 

ried  through.  Englishmen  may  well  feel,  however,  a 
sense  of  gratification  in  thinking  that  the  inspiration  of 
the  "  Encyclopaedia,"  nay,  more,  its  pattern  and  model, 
came  from  England.  "  Our  principal  debt,"  Diderot 
himself  wrote,  "  will  be  to  the  Chancellor  Bacon,  who 
sketched  the  plan  of  a  universal  dictionary  of  sciences 
and  arts  at  a  time  when  there  were  not,  so  to  say,  either 
arts  or  sciences."  The  impassioned  admirers  of  Bacon 
who  seek  to  adorn  his  great  memory  with  the  author- 
ship of  the  plays  of  Shakespeare  and  the  essays  of  Mon- 
taigne might  do  better  in  remembering  the  tribute  that 
Diderot  in  the  prospectus  and  D'Alembert  in  the  pre- 
liminary discourse  paid  to  the  memory  of  Francis  Bacon. 

The  very  plan  of  the  "  Encyclopaedia  "  was  modelled 
upon  an  English  example,  upon  the  cyclopaedia  of  Eph- 
raim  Chambers,  which  was  published  in  London  in  1727, 
and  which  was  translated  into  French  half  a  century 
later  with  a  view  to  its  publication  in  Paris.  Le  Breton, 
the  Paris  publisher,  wanted  a  man  of  letters  to  help  him 
in  bringing  out  the  book.  He  turned  to  Diderot,  who 
had  some  reputation  among  booksellers  as  a  needy,  hard- 
working author.  Diderot  examined  the  work,  saw  with 
the  swift  inspiration  of  genius  what  a  great  deed  was 
to  be  done,  and  suggested  to  Le  Breton  that  it  should 
be  done.  Diderot's  eloquence  inspired  Le  Breton,  in- 
spired even  D'Aguesseau  ;  in  the  January  of  1746,  a 
privilege  was  procured,  and  a  kind  of  syndicate  of  pub- 
lishers formed  to  run  the  concern.  Even  Diderot,  with 
his  wide  knowledge  and  desperate  capacity  for  work, 
felt  that  he  could  not  accomplish  an  encyclopaedia,  a 
"  book  that  should  be  all  books,"  single-handed.  He 
wanted  a  friend,  a  colleague,  an  ally;  he  found  that  ally, 
that  colleague,  that  friend,  in  D'Alembert. 

One  wintry  November  night  in  the  year  1717,  a  newly 


02  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

born  child  was  discovered,  well-nigh  dead  from  expo- 
sure, on  the  steps  of  the  church  of  St.  Jean  le  Rond.  A 
kindly  hearted  woman  of  the  people,  a  glazier's  wife, 
whose  name,  curiously  enough,  seems  to  have  been  Rous- 
seau, adopted  the  deserted  child.  The  child  was  the  son 
of  the  natural  son  of  Madame  de  Tencin,  an  authoress  of 
some  small  reputation  and  a  courtesan  of  no  reputation, 
who  had  been  the  mistress  of  a  large  variety  of  illustri- 
ous persons,  including  English  Bolingbroke  and  French 
D'Argenson.  No  very  illustrious  person,  however,  par- 
ented  the  young  D'Alembert  ;  his  sire  was  artillery- 
officer  Destouches-Canon,  the  brother  of  Destouches  the 
dramatist.  Mr.  John  Morley,  who  is  rather  fond  of 
sweeping  criticisms,  and  who  is  little  in  sympathy  with 
the  lighter  literature  of  the  eighteenth  century,  is  pleased 
to  describe  D'Alembert's  uncle  as  "  the  author  of  some 
poor  comedies."  The  criticism  is  neither  just  nor  happy. 
The  comedies  of  Destouches  are  scarcely  so  delightful  as 
the  comedies  of  Regnard,  but  Destouches  is  nearer  to 
Regnard  than  Regnard  is  to  Moliere,  and  some  of  Des- 
touches' comedies  are  both  excellent  and  entertaining. 
When  Destouches,  the  artillery-officer,  discovered  that 
his  son  had  been  adopted  by  the  poor  glass-worker,  he 
allowed  himself  to  feel  some  natural  promptings  of  duty, 
if  not  of  affection,  and  paid  from  time  to  time  certain 
small  sums  for  the  child's  education.  It  is  one  of  the 
many  curious  and  ironic  facts  attendant  upon  the  gene- 
sis of  the  French  Revolution  that  one  of  the  master 
minds  of  the  age,  one  of  the  dominant  forces  of  the 
"  Encyclopedia,"  should  owe  to  the  fostering  care  of 
the  people  the  right  to  breathe,  which  was  well-nigh 
denied  to  him  by  the  soldier  his  sire  and  the  harlot  his 
mother.  The  eighteenth  century  in  France,  so  largely 
swayed  by  harlots  and  by  soldiers,  was  fated  to  fall  be- 


1717.  D'ALEMBERT.  63 

fore  the  strange  alliance  of  the  philosophe  and  the  prole- 
taire,  and  never  did  philosophe  owe  more  to  the  proletaire 
than  D'Alembert,  or  more  keenly  remember  the  debt. 
Years  after,  when  he  had  become  famous,  and  Madame 
de  Tencin  was  eager  to  claim  her  kinship  with  him,  he 
repelled  her  proudly  with  the  words,  "  I  am  the  son  of 
the  glazier's  wife." 

Yet  if  he  was  the  son  of  the  glazier's  wife  —  if  he 
abided  with  her  for  no  less  than  forty  years,  he  was  not 
entirely  a  source  of  satisfaction  to  his  foster-mother. 
His  passion  for  learning,  which  distinguished  him  from 
the  moment  when,  in  1730,  he  entered  the  Mazarin  Col- 
lege, was  the  life-long  despair  of  Mistress  Rousseau. 
"  You  will  never  be  anything  but  a  philosopher,  and  a 
philosopher  is  only  a  madman,  who  makes  his  life  mis- 
erable in  order  that  people  may  talk  about  him  after  he 
is  dead."  Such  was  the  poor  opinion  held  by  the  gla- 
zier's wife  of  philosophers.  Nevertheless,  D'Alembert 
remained  obstinate,  remained  a  philosopher.  His  career 
resembles  that  of  Balzac's  Daniel  d'Arthez  in  its  single- 
minded  devotion  to  study.  He  was  happily  constituted 
with  a  perfect  genius  for  work.  How  many  men  of  let- 
ters there  are,  harassed  by  constitutional  infirmity,  who 
begin  each  morning  of  their  waking  life  with  the  mel- 
ancholy reflection,  "  What  can  I  avoid  doing  to-day  ?" 
D'Alembert  belonged  to  that  happier  class  who  salute 
the  day  with  the  cheerily  courageous  question,  "  "What 
can  I  do  to-day  ?"  Yet  this  exquisite  temperament  was 
not  due  to  physical  health.  His  physique  was  as  feeble 
as  Voltaire's,  as  feeble  as  Rousseau's ;  all  his  life  his 
health  was  bad,  and  his  health  reacted  naturally  enough 
upon  his  temper  and  made  him  fretful  and  impatient. 
D'Alembert  was  the  only  one  of  the  great  sceptics  who 
was  fostered  by  the  sheltering  wings  of  Jansenism. 


64  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

Most  of  the  other  Encyclopaedists  had  been  brought  up 
under  Jesuit  influences  ;  D'Alembert  alone  was  nur- 
tured on  Jansenism.  When  the  "  Encyclopaedia  "  was 
started,  Diderot's  thoughts  turned  at  once  to  D'Alem- 
bert. D'Alembert  was  a  great  mathematician,  one  of 
the  greatest  in  France  ;  geometry  was  to  him  the  pas- 
sion that  poetry  or  that  pleasure  is  to  men  of  different 
mould.  In  many  ways,  indeed,  in  most  ways,  D'Alem- 
bert was  strangely  dissimilar  to  Diderot.  All  that  was 
wild,  reckless,  wanton  in  Diderot's  nature  was  entirely 
wanting  to  D'Alembert's  character.  Diderot,  as  we 
have  said,  was  a  Bohemian  of  Bohemia.  D'Alembert 
was  precise,  even  austere,  scholastic.  Some  of  his  utter- 
ances on  the  scholastic  life  remind  us  of  the  later  lone- 
liness and  reserve  of  Arthur  Schopenhauer.  Even  the 
alliance  which  D'Alembert  formed  in  later  years  with 
Mdlle.  de  1'Espinasse  had  nothing  in  common  with  Dide- 
rot's wild  amours.  His  affection  for  that  greatly  gifted 
and  amazingly  sensitive  lady  was  not  a  cause  of  great 
happiness  to  D'Alembert,  but  it  was  an  affection  of  a 
high  type,  and  if  Mdlle.  de  1'Espinasse  could  only  have 
included  among  her  gifts  the  art  of  being  faithful,  she 
might  have  sweetened  instead  of  embittering  the  career 
of  the  great  philosopher. 

Around  these  two  men  the  little  army  of  writers  for 
the  great  work  grew  up  and  held  together.  High  stood 
Holbach  the  wealthy,  the  aggressively  atheistic,  who 
came  from  a  childhood  in  the  Palatinate  to  live  out  his 
life  in  Paris,  and  whose  "System  of  Nature,"  written 
under  the  pseudonym  of  Mirabaud,  was  attacked  by  both 
Voltaire  and  Frederick  the  Great ;  born  in  1723,  he  was 
to  live  till  the  dawn  of  Revolution  and  die  in  the  great 
year  1787.  High,  too,  stood  Grimm  —  Frederich  Mel- 
chior  Grimm — who,  born  in  the  same  year,  was  to  out- 


1715-1 807.  GRIMM  AND  HELVETIFS.  65 

live  the  century  and  die  in  1807  at  Gotha  with  a  mind 
stocked  with  marvellous  memories  —  memories  of  the 
war  against  Rameau  on  behalf  of  the  Italian  music  and 
his  headship  of  the  "  coin  de  la  Reine,"  memories  of  the 
great  "Encyclopaedia,"  memories  of  the  great  Revolu- 
tion. He  was  given  by  the  fates  nearly  a  century  of 
life,  and  he  was  lucky  in  his  century  and  the  lines  his 
life  was  cast  in.  High  stood  Claude  Adrien  Helvetius, 
who  was  born  in  Paris  in  1715,  the  year  of  the  Sun- 
King's  death,  of  a  race  of  quacks  and  physicians  ;  who 
was  in  turns  farmer-general,  versifier,  man  of  letters. 
He  wrote  a  book  "  On  the  Mind,"  which  came  near  to 
teaching  Utilitarianism,  but  only  succeeded  in  laying 
down  the  doctrine  that  the  love  of  pleasure  and  the  dis- 
like of  pain  were  the  sole  motives  for  our  actions.  The 
book  shocked  tne  youth  of  Madame  Roland,  roused  the 
critical  wrath  of  Turgot,  and  was  publicly  burned.  Hel- 
vetius was  otherwise  remarkable  for  marrying  a  very 
pretty  wife,  whom  we  shall  meet  again,  and  for  being 
the  friend  of  the  Great  Frederick.  If  he  made  a  hard 
and  unpopular  landlord,  he  did  at  least  shelter  the  Young 
Pretender  generously  in  his  hour  of  need,  and  pension 
Marivaux.  He  died  in  1771.  These  were  the  generals 
of  the  Encyclopaedic  army.  It  was  a  strange  and  mis- 
cellaneous army.  The  greatest  thinkers  of  the  time 
wrote  on  the  topics  to  which  they  had  devoted  their 
profoundest  thoughts  ;  ladies  of  fashion  sent  dainty 
fragments  of  information  about  clothes  and  coquettish 
minutiae  about  the  dressing  of  the  hair.  The  "  Book 
that  was  to  be  all  Books"  was  to  be  as  catholic  as  the 
world  itself  and  to  contain  all  things.  Nothing  in  the 
history  of  literature  is  more  remarkable  than  the  way  in 
which  all  these  people,  philosophers  and  fair  ladies, 
economists,  scholars,  soldiers,  and  wits,  worked  together 
I.— 5 


66  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  IV. 

at  the  great  work  in  loyal  and  even  loving  unison. 
There  was  no  writer  for  the  "Encyclopaedia"  who  did 
not  take  a  personal  pride  in  the  "  Encyclopaedia."  The 
influence  of  the  "  Encyclopaedia  "  upon  the  thought  that 
tended  to  Revolution  is  incalculable.  It  was  only  not 
as  great  an  influence  at  that  of  Voltaire,  and  the  influ- 
ence of  Voltaire  himself  was  not  so  distinctly  instru- 
mental in  bringing  the  Revolution  about  as  was  the  in- 
fluence of  the  self -torturing  sophist,  wild  Rousseau. 


1712.  JEAN  JACQUES  ROUSSEAU.  67 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE    APOSTLE    OF    AFFLICTION. 

THE  first  spot  which  the  stranger  seeks  in  visiting 
Geneva  is  the  little  island  which  bears  the  name  of 
Geneva's  greatest  citizen.  It  is  but  a  little  handful  of 
earth,  carefully  banked  against  the  wear  of  the  waters, 
carefully  railed  and  kept  scrupulously  trim.  It  presents 
the  usual  medley  of  the  sublime  and  the  ridiculous  essen- 
tial, or  at  least  inevitable,  to  all  show-places.  One  of 
the  most  conspicuous  objects  on  the  little  island  is  a 
refreshment  kiosk,  where  a  placard  infoi'ms  the  thirsty 
that  American  drinks  are  compounded.  The  other  is 
a  statue  of  the  greatest  thinker  and  teacher  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  Jean  Jacques  Rousseau.  Here  he 
loved  to  come  in  the  days  of  his  youth,  when  the  con- 
fines of  the  island  in  their  natural  shape  met  the  waves 
and  ripples  of  the  lake,  and  when  what  is  now  called 
the  Old  Town  was  the  only  Geneva  extant,  rising  tier 
upon  tier  of  dull  brown  roofs  along  its  hill,  clustering 
about  the  antique  towers  of  its  church,  with  the  eternal 
lines  of  the  twin  Saleve  hills  for  a  background.  The 
new  Geneva,  the  Geneva  of  the  traveller  and  the  tourist, 
had  not  come  into  existence  then  ;  but  the  Geneva  of  to- 
day, which  offers  its  shelter  to  the  Nihilist  and  to  the 
cosmopolitan  revolutionary,  is  practically  in  spirit  the 
same  Geneva  which  sheltered  the  Protestant  family  of 
Rousseau  from  the  wrath  of  a  persecuting  king. 

Rousseau  was  born  in  Geneva  on  June  28,  1712.    Early 


68  THE  FKENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

in  the  sixteenth  century,  Didier  Rousseau,  a  bookseller 
of  Paris,  carried  his  Protestantism  from  Paris  to  Geneva, 
and  there  set  up  his  staff.  A  son  Jean  begat  a  son 
David,  and  a  son  David  begat  a  son  Isaac,  and  the  son 
Isaac  begat  Jean  Jacques,  and  with  him,  all  unwitting- 
ly, the  "Contrat  Social"  and  the  French  Revolution. 
Rousseau's  birth  cost  his  mother  her  life.  To  use  Mr. 
Morley's  fine  phrase,  Rousseau  "  was  born  dying."  "  My 
birth,"  he  writes  himself,  in  the  "  Confessions,"  with  that 
note  of  almost  intolerable  pessimism  which  he  always 
loved  to  strike,  "was  the  first  of  my  misfortunes."  The 
motherless  child  had  the  strangest  imaginable  education. 
Isaac  Rousseau  was  an  imaginative  dreamer,  and  he  com- 
municated the  grave  malady  to  his  son.  There  is  noth- 
ing in  the  last  century  at  once  more  pleasing  and  more 
poignant  than  the  picture  Rousseau  draws  of  the  long 
evenings  he  and  his  father  spent  together,  the  man 
and  the  child  of  seven,  reading  to  one  another  in  turn 
the  novels  and  romances  that  the  mother  had  collected 
together.  Through  the  long  hours  of  the  night,  the 
strangely  assorted  pair  would  sit  and  follow  with  fever- 
ish delight  the  long-winded  evolutions  of  last  century 
fiction  until  the  music  of  the  morning  birds  would  arouse 
them  from  their  paradise  to  the  consciousness  of  a 
workaday  world  outside  which  was  waking  up  and 
busy.  When  the  undiluted  fiction  was  exhausted,  then 
came  the  service  of  the  scarcely  less  fanciful  muse  of 
history.  Before  the  eyes  of  Isaac  and  Jean  Jacques 
the  glittering  brocaded  panorama  of  Venetian  history 
unfolded  itself,  and  the  mind  of  the  child  gave  itself  up 
in  wondering  homage  to  the  worship  of  Plutnrch  and 
the  Plutarchian  heroes.  "Every  healthy  child  is  a 
Greek  or  a  Roman."  Such  is  the  axiom  of  a  very  dif- 
ferent philosopher  from  Jean  Jacques,  of  transatlantic, 


1712-24.         ROUSSEAU,  A   PUPIL   OF   PLUTARCH.  69 

transcendental,  Bostonian  Emerson,  himself  the  hearti- 
est lover  of  Plutarch  of  modern  times.  Rousseau  was 
not  a  healthy  child,  but  he  shared  the  common  lot  of  all 
intelligent  children  in  becoming  an  antique  hero.  The 
heart  of  any  child  in  which  the  least  seed  of  the  heroic 
is  by  good-fortune  sown  always  swells  over  the  splen- 
did pages  of  Greek  courage  and  Roman  fortitude ;  it 
is  possible  that  the  heart  of  a  sickly,  sensitive,  and  high- 
ly imaginative  child  beats  all  the  quicker  for  the  very 
difference  which  chymic  destiny  has  made  between  him 
and  the  breed  of  heroes.  However  that  may  be,  the 
heroes  ot'Plutarch  came  out  of  the  dead  past,  and  walked 
abroad  with  the  child  Rousseau,  welcomed  him  to  their 
fellowship,  hailed  him -as  a  peer.  It  is  a  proof  of  the 
amazing,  delicious,  self -deceptive  affectation  of  child- 
hood that  we  find  the  young  Rousseau  on  one  occasion 
startling  his  hearers,  in  recounting  the  myth  of  Mutius 
Scaevola,  by  stretching  his  little  arm  over  a  hot  chafing- 
dish,  and  so  quickening  the  spirit  of  the  ancient  legend. 
A  like  tale  is  to  be  told  in  later  days  of  another  disciple 
of  Plutarch,  a  disciple  of  Jean  Jacques,  the  young  St. 
Just. 

Rousseau  was  left  at  an  early  age  practically  an  only 
child.  There  was  an  elder,  most  unruly  brother,  who 
took  to  himself  the  key  of  the  fields  and  vanished  from 
the  knowledge  of  his  kinsfolk  and  from  the  knowledge 
of  history  forever.  Imagination,  which  always  stands 
on  tiptoe  by  the  side  of  her  stern  sister,  History,  would 
dearly  like  to  speculate  on  the  fate  of  that  lost  child  of 
the  Rousseau  race.  He  was  seven  years  older  than  Jean 
Jacques,  who  does  not  even  tell  us  his  name  ;  he  was 
brought  up  to  the  father's  trade  of  watch-making;  he 
was  a  libertine  and  a  rascal ;  he  was  tenderly  loved  by 
Jean  Jacques.  Once  Jean  Jacques  flung  himself  be- 


70  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

tween  the  brother  and  a  beating  which  the  father  was 
bestowing  on  him,  and  received  the  blows  until  the  father 

O  ' 

stayed  his  hand.  Let  us  hope  the  brother  was  not  un- 
grateful. "  He  loved  me,"  says  Rousseau,  "  as  much  as 
a  scapegrace  can  love  anything."  At  last  the  scapegrace 
took  himself  off  altogether  ;  a  vague  rumor  reached  his 
relatives  that  he  had  gone  to  Germany  ;  he  never  wrote 
them  a  line  ;  that  was  the  end  of  him.  For  all  that 
they  knew,  for  all  that  we  know,  he  may  have  been  dead 
and  buried  within  a  year  of  his  flight  ;  or  he  may  have 
changed  his  name  and  his  mode  of  life,  and  ended  not 
dishonorably.  Who  knows?  There  may  have  been 
in  some  German  town  a  Rousseau  who  followed  with 
wonder  and  delight  the  rising  fame  of  Jean  Jacques, 
and  said  to  himself,  "  Behold  my  brother."  But  if  he 
did  he  kept  his  admiration  to  himself,  and  Jean  Jacques 
never  heard  of  him  again. 

His  early  education  was  with  an  aunt,  a  singer  of 
sweet  old  songs,  the  memory  of  which  clung  to  Jean 
Jacques  and  brought  tears  into  his  eyes  in  days  long 
later.  Then  his  father  quarrelled  with  the  operations 
of  the  law  in  Geneva,  broke  up  his  home,  and  sent  Jean 
Jacques,  then  ten  years  old,  to  M.  Lambercier's  school 
at  Bossey  village.  Here  he  first  learned  his  passion  for 
the  country  ;  here  too  he  gained  that  other  extraordinary 
passion  which  he  has  set  forth  so  crudely  in  the  "  Con- 
fessions," and  which  may  well  be  left  there.  True  to 
that  strange  principle  with  which  he  set  out  in  writing 
his  life,  the  principle  of  leaving  "  nothing  to  tell  to  God," 
he  regards  the  sensual  dawnings  in  the  feeble  body  of  an 
imaginative  child  with  a  direct  simplicity  which  would 
make  one  loathe  virility  if  it  were  not  that  the  absence 
of  virility  was  the  quickening  cause  of  Rousseau's  dis- 
eased, unhappy  imaginings.  Let  us  pity  and  pass  on. 


1722-48.  THE  "CONFESSIONS."  71 

While  at  Bossey  a  rigorous  punishment  for  an  offence 
which  he  had  not  committed  roused  in  the  childish  mind 
that  first  sense  of  the  Swift-like  "fierce  indignation" 
against  injustice  which  became  the  key.-note  of  his  life. 
To  the  hysterical  temperament  of  Jean  Jacques  the 
sense  of  wrong  was  like  the  travail  of  a  new  birth,  sharp- 
ly dividing  the  old  childish  life  from  the  new.  From 
Bossey,  Rousseau  came  back  to  Geneva  to  live  with  his 
uncle  and  to  prepare  for  the  vocation  of  a  minister.  But 
he  was  sent  first  to  a  notary's  office,  and  when  he  was 
promptly  dismissed  thence  for  incapacity  he  was  ap- 
prenticed to  an  engraver.  The  engraver  was  a  rough, 
brutal  man  ;  his  brutality  converted  Rousseau  into  a 
liar,  a  coward,  and  a  thief.  At  last,  in  sheer  terror  of 
his  savage  taskmaster  and  of  a  promised  chastisement, 
Rousseau  followed  the  example  of  the  ne'er-do-weel  elder 
brother  and  in  his  turn  ran  away.  He  was  then  sixteen 
years  old.  Without  a  penny  in  his  pockets,  without  a 
trade,  without  an  object,  without  any  friends  save  those 
he  was  leaving  behind  him,  he  faced  the  world  and  step- 
ped boldly  forth  into  the  unknown.  It  is  a  curious  ex- 
ample of  the  strangely  contrasted  nature  of  Rousseau 
that  the  spirit  which  shrank  in  despair  from  a  physical 
punishment  confronted  with  an  almost  heroic  indiffer- 
ence the  perilous  possibilities  of  the  vagabond  life.  But 
the  old  note  of  romance  was  once  more  set  a-stirring. 
Rousseau  saw  himself  on  his  fool's  errand  as  the  hero  of 
all  manner  of  wonderful  and  delightful  adventures ;  he 
noted  no  darkness  on  his  dubious  course,  but  only  a 
nursery  world  of  festivals,  of  treasures,  of  adventures, 
of  loving  friends  and  complaisant  mistresses,  and  he 
stepped  ont  with  a  high  heart  like  a  child  in  a  fairy  tale. 
He  drifted  for  a  day  or  two  among  the  villages  adjacent 
to  Geneva,  tasting  the  ready  hospitality  of  the  peasant. 


72  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

Then  he  made  his  way  to  Confignon  village,  in  Savoy, 
where  a  zealous  priest  dwelt,  M.  de  Pontverre.  Rous- 
seau visited  the  priest,  listened  to  his  arguments,  ac- 
cepted his  dinner  and  his  Frangi  wine,  found  his  argu- 
ments excellent,  and  intimated  his  readiness  to  enter  the 
Catholic  Church.  To  hasten  that  end  M.  de  Pontverre 
sent  his  young  disciple  post-haste  to  Annecy,  to  Madame 
de  Warens  and  his  fate. 

After  three  lazy  lounging  days,  singing  under  every 
chateau  window  in  the  hope  of  evoking  the  adventures 
which  never  came,  Rousseau  found  himself  at  Annecy, 
and  entered  upon  the  epoch  of  his  life  which,  as  he  says 
himself,  decided  his  character.  He  expected  to  meet  a 
wrinkled  devotee  ;  he  found  the  fairest  face,  the  bluest 
eyes,  the  most  dazzling  complexion,  the  most  enchanting 
throat,  all  the  charms  that  a  young  and  pretty  woman 
possesses  in  the  eyes  of  an  imaginative,  sentimental  lad. 
Here,  on  the  threshold  of  the  long-looked-for  adventure, 
Rousseau  pauses  to  give  a  portrait  of  himself,  and  \ve 
may  well  pause  with  him  to  look  on  the  picture.  A 
slight,  well-proportioned  figure,  a  neat  foot,  a  fine  leg, 
a  dainty  mouth,  black  hair  and  brows,  eyes  deeply  sunk 
and  small,  but  full  of  passionate  fire,  a  manner  unusually 
awkward  and  timid,  such  were  the  characteristics  of  the 
young  convert  who  presented  himself  to  Madame  de 
Warens.  A  pretty  fellow  enough,  indeed  ;  but  he  says 
that  he  was  quite  unconscious  of  his  physical  advan- 
tages, which  perhaps  we  may  slightly  doubt.  His  eyes 
were  evidently  the  feature  of  his  face.  In  the  memoirs 
of  Madame  d'Epinay  two  independent  tributes  are  to 
be  found,  written  in  later  years,  to  the  attractions  of 
his  eyes  :  "  eyes  that  overflow  with  fire,"  says  one  wit- 
ness;  "eyes  that  tell  that  love  plays  a  great  part  in  his 
romance,"  says  the  other.  But  those  eyes  did  not  just 


1728-32.  MADAME  DE  WAKENS.  73 

then  overlook  Madame  de  Warens.  She  received  the 
youth  courteously,  kindly  ;  despatched  him  to  a  monas- 
tery in  Turin  to  complete  his  conversion.  Once  again 
Rousseau  tramped  along,  cheered  by  a  bright  enjoy- 
ment of  the  changing  scenes  of  each  day's  journey.  At 
Turin  the  curious  process  of  Rousseau's  conversion  was 
completed  ;  at  Turin  he  faced  for  the  first  time  in  a 
foul  adventure  some  of  the  most  horrible  facts  of  life. 
Soon  he  found  himself  alone  in  Turin  without  money, 
with  dreams  of  adventures  still  buzzing  in  his  head,  but 
never  taking  tangible  shape.  He  became  a  lackey  in 
a  lady's  house  ;  he  stole  a  piece  of  ribbon,  and  charged 
the  crime  upon  an  honest,  comely  girl,  a  fellow-servant, 
and  was  haunted  by  regret  for  his  baseness  all  his  life  ; 
he  starved  in  garrets  and  became  again  a  lackey,  and 
was  dismissed  this  time,  and,  having  no  better  thing  to 
do,  thought  of  Madame  de  Warens,  and  turned  again 
his  adventurous  footsteps  towards  Annecy.  In  the  au- 
tumn of  1729  he  appeared  for  the  second  time  before 
Madame  de  Warens.  With  her  for  nearly  ten  years  his 
life  became  identified.  Much  of  these  years  were  still 
what  the  Germans  would  call  Wander- Years,  years 
spent  in  drifting  here  and  there,  now  to  Lyons,  now  to 
Paris,  now  to  Freiburg,  seeking  an  occupation,  seeking 
employment,  seeking  an  aim  in  life,  with  no  great  assi- 
duity, with  no  consistency — a  vagrant,  drifting  creature. 
He  was  declared  too  ignorant  to  be  a  priest ;  he  had 
not  sufficient  application  to  become  a  fine  musician,  and 
the  story  of  his  audacity  in  attempting  to  conduct  a 
concert  at  Lausanne  without  knowing  anything  about 
music  is  rich  in  solemn  caricature.  In  1732  he  settled 
down  at  Chambery  with  Madame  de  Warens  and  with 
her  friend  Claude  Anet  in  the  most  extraordinary  fam- 
ily union  ever  recorded. 


74  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

But  this  household,  like  all  other  households,  had  its 
terra.  Anet  died,  and  Rousseau  wept  for  him  and  wore 
his  black  coat.  Then  he  and  Madame  de  Warens  re- 
tired to  that  most  famous  farmhouse,  Les  Charmettes, 
and  Rousseau  dallied  with  nature  and  vexed  himself 
over  theology,  and  tried  unsuccessfully  to  learn  Latin 
and  fencing,  dancing  and  chess.  Then  in  process  of 
time  the  Charmettes  idyl  broke  up.  Rousseau,  unfaith- 
ful to  Madame  de  Warens,  was  much  surprised  and 
pained  to  find  that  she  was  unfaithful  to  him.  They 
parted,  and  the  happiest  hours  of  Rousseau's  unhappy 
life  came  to  an  end.  Dismally  poor,  he  drifted  to  Paris 
and  tried  to  convince  the  Academy  of  Sciences  of  the 
merits  of  a  system  of  musical  notation  which  he  con- 
sidered that  he  had  discovered.  Poverty  held  him  for 
her  own  till,  in  1743,  he  was  made  secretary  to  the  French 
ambassador  to  Venice,  M.  de  Montaigu,  whom  Rousseau 
soon  cordially  hated.  Eighteen  not  unhappy  months 
in  Venice  came  to  an  end  in  1V45,  which  found  him  in 
Paris  again,  in  a  squalid  Sorbonne  hostelry,  which  it 
had  been  better  for  him  never  to  have  seen.  For  here 
he  met  Therese  Le  Vasseur,  pitied  her,  loved  her,  and 
most  madly  made  her  the  companion  of  his  life.  She 
was  as  ignorant  as  a  Digger  Indian,  yet  Rousseau  was 
fond  of  her,  remained  fond  of  her  when  she  had  ceased 
to  be  fond  of  him.  We  need  not  dwell  upon  the  mel- 
ancholy story  of  the  children  of  this  strange  union,  de- 
posited, each  in  its  turn,  in  the  foundling  hospital,  and 
untraceable  forever  even  to  the  kind-hearted  Marechale 
de  Luxembourg.  The  speculative  mind,  the  mind  of 
the  romancist,  might  employ  itself  not  unprofitably  in 
wondering  what  became  of  those  five  children,  the  name- 
less bearers  of  the  blood  of  Rousseau.  But  if  Therese 
did  take  to  drinking  brandy  and  to  running  after  stable 


1760.  "NOUVELLE   HELOISE"  AND   "EMILE."  -76 

boys,  we  must  admit  that  she  had  some  excuse  in  the 
conduct  of  a  husband  who  forced  her  against  her  will 
to  be  so  unnatural  a  mother. 

Rousseau's  life  is  not  a  pleasant  life  to  dwell  upon. 
Stern  poverty  did  not  ennoble  him,  though  it  made  him 
utter  noble  words.  His  friendships  with  Diderot  and 
with  Grimm  ended  only  in  miserable  squabbles ;  his 
love  affairs  were  too  often  ludicrous;  fame,  which  never 
brought  him  wealth,  never  brought  him  dignity  in  his 
attitude  to  life.  He  seems  to  have  thought  that  every 
woman  should  fall  in  love  with  him  ;  he  seems  to  have 
thought  that  every  other  man  of  genius  was  one  in  a 
plot  to  conspire  against  and  to  injure  him.  His  visit 
to  England  was  but  an  acrid  Odyssey,  and  added  his 
friend  and  host,  Hume,  to  the  list  of  his  fancied  enemies. 
His  grim  end  by  his  own  hand,  at  that  Ermenonville 
where  he  loved  to  botanize,  is  the  stern  conclusion  of 
one  of  the  saddest  lives  ever  wasted  on  our  wasting 
planet. 

It  is  pleasanter  to  think  of  the  books  than  of  the  man. 
His  first  great  success  was  the  "  Nouvelle  Helo'ise,"  one 
of  the  most  exquisite  romances  ever  written.  The  hap- 
piest judgment  is  expressed  by  Lord  Beaconsfield  in 
his  last  novel,  and  in  some  of  the  most  graceful  words 
he  ever  penned,  when  he  speaks  of  "  those  feelings  which 
still  echo  in  the  heights  of  Meilleraie,  and  compared  to 
which  all  the  glittering  accidents  of  fortune  sink  into 
insignificance."  Then  came  the  "  Social  Contract,"  with 
the  Revolution  in  its  womb,  and  "  Emile,"  for  which 
the  imbecile  Paris  Parliament  ordered  his  arrest.  The 
social  success  of  "Emile"  was  something  surprising;  it 
rivalled  the  fame  of  the  sorrows  of  the  divine  Julie. 
Taine  draws  a  skilful  picture  of  the  woman  of  the 
court,  to  whom  love  is  mere  gallantry  of  which  the 


^6  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

exquisite  polish  poorly  conceals  the  shallowness,  cold- 
ness, and,  occasionally,  wickedness  ;  to  whom  life  means 
only  the  adventures  and  personages  of  Crebillon  the 
younger.  One  evening,  however,  this  idle  creature  finds 
the  "  Nouvelle  Helo'ise  "  on  her  toilet-table  ;  she  reads, 
and  keeps  her  horses  and  footmen  waiting  from  hour  to 
hour ;  at  last,  at  four  o'clock  in  the  morning,  she  orders 
the  horses  to  be  unharnessed,  and  then  she  passes  the 
rest  of  the  night  in  reading  and  in  tears  ;  for  the  first 
time  in  her  life  she  finds  a  man  who  knows  what  love 
really  means.  In  like  manner,  those  who  would  com- 
prehend the  success  of  "  Emile  "  must  call  to  mind  the 
children  of  the  age  ;  the  embroidered,  gilded,  dressed- 
up,  powdered  little  gentlemen,  decked  with  sword  and 
sash,  carrying  the  hat  under  the  arm,  bowing,  presenting 
the  hand,  rehearsing  fine  attitudes  before  a  mirror,  re- 
peating prepared  compliments,  pretty  little  puppets,  in 
whom  everything  is  the  work  of  the  tailor,  the  hair- 
dresser, the  preceptor,  and  the  dancing-master  ;  the  pre- 
cocious little  ladies  of  six  years,  still  more  artificial, 
bound  up  in  whalebone,  harnessed  in  a  heavy  skirt  com- 
posed of  hair  and  a  girdle  of  iron,  supporting  a  head- 
dress two  feet  in  height,  so  many  veritable  dolls  to 
which  rouge  is  applied,  and  with  whom  a  mother  amuses 
herself  each  morning  for  an  hour  and  then  consigns  them 
to  her  maids  for  the  rest  of  the  day.  But  when  this 
mother  reads  "Emile"  she  immediately  makes  senti- 
mentally sensible  resolutions  to  dress  her  offspring  bet- 
ter and  to  nurse  her  next  child  herself. 

Seldom  have  men  been  more  misappreciated  during 
and  since  their  lifetime  than  was  Rousseau.  We  think 
with  despair  of  that  letter  of  the  Comtesse  de  Boufflers 
to  Gustavus  III.,  published  by  Geffroy.  "I  intrust," 
says  this  rash  critic,  "to  Baron  de  Lederheim,  though 


1760.  THE   "NOUVELLE  H^LOISE."  V7 

with  reluctance,  a  book  for  you  which  has  just' been 
published,  the  infamous  memoirs  of  Rousseau  entitled 
'  Confessions.'  They  seem  to  me  those  of  a  common 
scullion  and  even  lower  than  that,  being  dull  through- 
out, whimsical  and  vicious  in  the  most  offensive  manner. 
I  do  not  recur  to  my  worship  of  him,  for  such  it  was ; 
I  shall  never  console  myself  for  its  having  caused  the 
death  of  that  eminent  man  David  Hume,  who,  to  grat- 
ify me,  undertook  to  entertain  that  filthy  animal  in 
England." 

We  think  with  despair,  too,  of  M.  Taine  writing  that 
"  an  effort  of  the  will  is  required  to  read  the  '  Nouvelle 
Helo'ise,' "  and  of  Mr.  John  Morley's  slighting  remarks 
upon  that  marvellous  book  —  remarks  which  make  it 
clear  that  he  has  never  read  it  with  the  care  it  deserved, 
and  has  unconsciously  misunderstood  and  misrepresent- 
ed some  of  its  most  essential  features.  Yet  Mr.  Morley 
can  in  general  appreciate  Rousseau,  although  there  is  a 
coldness  in  his  great  biography  which  Mr.  Morley  seems 
to  feel  towards  every  man  but  Burke.  Yet  M.  Taine 
can  appreciate  Rousseau,  as  he  shows  when  he  describes 
Rousseau  as  the  artisan,  the  man  of  the  people,  ill-adapt- 
ed to  elegant  and  refined  society,  out  of  his  element  in 
a  drawing-room  ;  the  man  of  low  birth,  badly  brought 
up,  sullied  by  a  vile  and  precocious  experience,  highly 
and  offensively  sensual ;  the  man  of  morbid  mind  and 
body,  fretted  by  superior  and  discordant  faculties,  pos- 
sessing no  tact,  and  carrying  the  contamination  of  his 
imagination,  temperament,  and  past  life  into  his  austere 
morality  and  into  his  purest  idyls  ;  the  man  who  has  no 
fervor ;  the  man  who  is  the  opposite  of  Diderot,  avow- 
ing himself  that  his  ideas  arrange  themselves  in  his 
head  with  the  utmost  difficulty,  that  certain  sentences 
are  turned  over  and  over  again  in  his  brain  for  five  or 


78  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

six  nights  before  he  puts  them  on  paper,  and  that  a 
letter  on  the  most  trifling  subject  costs  him  hours  of 
fatigue ;  the  man  who  cannot  fall  into  an  easy  and 
asrreeable  tone,  nor  succeed  otherwise  than  in  works 

O  * 

which  demand  application.  "As  an  offset  to  this,  style, 
in  this  ardent  brain,  under  the  influence  of  intense,  pro- 
longed meditation,  incessantly  hammered  and  re-ham- 
mered, becomes  more  concise  and  of  higher  temper  than 
is  elsewhere  found.  Since  La  Bruyere  we  have  seen  no 
more  ample,  virile  phrases,  in  which  anger,  admiration, 
indignation,  studied  and  concentrated  passion,  appear 
with  more  rigorous  precision  and  more  powerful  relief. 
He  is  almost  the  equal  of  La  Bruyere  in  the  arrange- 
ment of  skilful  effects,  in  the  aptness  and  ingenuity  of 
developments,  in  the  terseness  of  impressive  summaries, 
in  the  overpowering  directness  of  unexpected  arguments, 
in  the  multiplicity  of  literary  achievements,  in  the  exe- 
cution of  those  passages  of  bravura,  portraits,  descrip- 
tions, comparisons,  creations,  wherein,  as  in  a  musical 
crescendo,  the  same  idea,  varied  by  a  series  of  yet  more 
animated  expressions,  attains  to  or  surpasses,  at  the  last 
note,  all  that  is  possible  of  energy  and  of  brilliancy." 

This  is  skilful  criticism,  keen  as  a  knife,  clean-cutting, 
dexterous ;  but  there  is  even  keener  to  be  found  in  a 
great  English  writer.  Hazlitt  has  never  been  happier 
than  in  his  study  of  Rousseau.  Rousseau,  he  says  in 
an  essay  informed  with  fine  sympathy,  "  had  the  most 
intense  consciousness  of  his  own  existence.  No  object 
that  had  once  made  an  impression  on  him  was  ever  after 
effaced.  Every  feeling  in  his  mind  became  a  passion. 
His  craving  after  excitement  was  an  appetite  and  a  dis- 
ease. His  interest  in  his  own  thoughts  and  feelings  was 
always  wound  up  to  the  highest  pitch,  and  hence  the 
enthusiasm  which  he  excited  in  others.  He  owed  the 


1712-78.  HAZLITT  AXD  ROUSSEAU.  79 

power  which  he  exercised  over  the  opinions  of  all  Eu- 
rope, by  which  he  created  numberless  disciples  and 
overturned  established  systems,  to  the  tyranny  which 
his  feelings  in  the  first  instance  exercised  over  himself. 
The  dazzling  blaze  of  his  reputation  was  kindled  by  the 
same  fii'e  that  fed  upon  his  vitals.  His  ideas  differed 
from  those  of  other  men  only  in  their  force  and  inten- 
sity. His  genius  was  the  effect  of  his  temperament. 
He  created  nothing,  he  demonstrated  nothing,  by  a  pure 
effort  of  the  understanding.  His  fictitious  characters 
are  modifications  of  his  own  being,  reflections  and  shad- 
ows of  himself.  His  speculations  are  the  obvious  exag- 
gerations of  a  mind  giving  loose  to  its  habitual  im- 
pulses, and  moulding  all  nature  to  its  own  purposes. 
Hence  his  enthusiasm  and  his  eloquence,  bearing  down 
all  opposition.  Hence  the  warmth  and  the  luxuriance 
as  well  as  the  sameness  of  his  descriptions.  Hence  the 
frequent  verboseness  of  his  style,  for  passion  lends  force 
and  reality  to  language  and  makes  words  supply  the 
place  of  imagination.  Hence  the  tenaciousness  of  his 
logic,  the  acuteness  of  his  observations,  the  refinement 
and  the  inconsistency  of  his  reasoning.  Hence  his  keen 
penetration  and  his  strange  want  of  comprehension  of 
mind;  for  the  same  intense  feeling  which  enabled  him 
to  discern  the  first  principles  of  things,  and  seize  some 
one  view  of  a  subject  in  all  its  ramifications,  prevented 
him  from  admitting  the  operation  of  other  causes  which 
interfered  with  his  favorite  purpose  and  involved  him 
in  endless  wilful  contradictions.  Hence  his  excessive 
egotism,  which  filled  all  objects  with  himself  and  would 
have  occupied  the  universe  with  his  smallest  interest. 
Hence  his  jealousy  and  suspicion  of  others;  for  no  at- 
tention, no  respect  or  sympathy,  could  come  up  to  the 
extravagant  claims  of  his  self-love.  Hence  his  dissatis- 


80  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

faction  with  himself  and  with  all  around  him;  for  noth- 
ing could  satisfy  his  ardent  longings  after  good,  his 
restless  appetite  of  being.  Hence  his  feelings,  over- 
strained and  exhausted,  recoiled  upon  themselves,  and 
produced  his  love  of  silence  and  repose,  his  feverish  aspi- 
rations after  the  quiet  and  solitude  of  nature.  Hence, 
in  part  also,  his  quarrel  with  the  artificial  institutions 
and  distinctions  of  society,  which  opposed  so  many  bar- 
riers to  the  restrained  indulgence  of  his  will,  and  allured 
his  imagination  to  scenes  of  pastoral  simplicity  or  of 
savage  life,  where  the  passions  were  either  not  excited 
or  left  to  follow  their  own  impulse — where  the  petty 
vexations  and  irritating  disappointments  of  common 
life  had  no  place — and  where  the  tormenting  pursuits 
of  arts  and  sciences  were  lost  in  pure  animal  enjoyment 
or  indolent  repose.  Thus  he  describes  the  first  savage 
wandering  forever  under  the  shade  of  magnificent  for- 
ests, or  by  the  side  of  mighty  rivers,  smit  with  the  un- 
quenchable love  of  nature."  Never  has  the  master  mind 
of  the  last  century  been  more  admirably  appreciated. 
It  is  gratifying,  too,  to  find  that  Hazlitt  shares  with  Lord 
Beaconsfield  that  fine  enthusiasm  for  the  "Nouvelle 
Helo'ise  "  which  helps  to  console  us  for  Mr.  John  Mor- 
ley's  somewhat  ungenerous  treatment  of  that  enchant- 
ing book. 

The  writings  of  Rousseau  which  had  the  most  direct 
influence  in  bringing  about  the  Deluge,  so  composedly 
anticipated  by  the  fifteenth  Louis,  were  the  "  Discourse 
on  the  Influence  of  Learning  and  Art,"  whose  appear- 
ance in  1750  effected,  according  to  Grimm,  a  kind  of 
revolution  in  Paris;  the  "Discourse  on  Inequality," 
published  in  1754;  and,  above  and  beyond  all,  the  "So- 
cial Contract,"  which  came  upon  the  world  like  a  thun- 
derclap in  1762.  The  essay  on  the  "  Causes  of  Inequal- 


1754.         "CAUSES  OF  INEQUALITY  AMONG  MEN."  81 

ity  among  Men  "  contained,  as  has  been  happily  said, 
"the  germs  of  the  whole  radical  democratic  system 
which  he  developed  in  his  numerous  subsequent  writ- 
ings." In  the  second  essay  Rousseau  declares  civiliza- 
tion to  be  a  disease,  and  civilized  men  a  degenerate 
race.  All  the  customs  and  institutions  of  a  developed 
society  are,  in  his  opinion,  unnatural  and  artificial.  To 
abolish  society,  therefore,  and  return  to  what  he  chooses 
to  call  the  "  state  of  nature,"  is  the  one  thing  necessary 
to  happiness.  Inequality  among  men  is  the  result  of 
their  degeneration;  and  this  degeneration  is  caused  by 
society;  which,  he  admits,  may  develop  the  capacities 
and  perfect  the  understandings  of  men,  but  makes  them 
morally  bad.  This  assertion  he  attempts  to  justify  by 
saj'ing  that  the  existing  social  order  had  been  produced 
by  an  unnatural  measure  of  power  on  the  one  hand,  and 
an  unnatural  weakness  on  the  other. 

Rousseau  soon  leaves  the  solid  ground  of  reality,  and 
deduces  from  the  ideals  of  his  own  brain,  as  premises, 
all  manner  of  conclusions.  The  first  man,  he  cries,  who, 
after  enclosing  a  piece  of  land,  dared  to  say,  This  is 
mine,  and  found  other  men  simple  enough  to  believe 
him,  was  the  true  founder  of  civilization.  What  crimes, 
what  wars,  what  murders,  what  misery  and  horror  would 
have  been  spared  the  human  race,  if  some  one,  then,  had 
torn  down  the  enclosure,  and  had  cried  to  his  fellows: 
"Beware  of  listening  to  this  impostor;  you  are  lost,  if 
you  ever  forget  that  the  fruits  of  the  earth  belong  to  all 
in  common,  and  the  earth  itself  to  no  one." 

Not  unnaturally  the  plebeian  Rousseau,  "living  from 
hand  to  mouth,  by  turns  valet,  clerk,  tramp,  tutor,  copy- 
ist, author,  fugitive,"  was  filled  with  fitful  hatred  of  the 
rich  and  powerful.  This  fitful  hatred,  together  with  an 
abiding  love  of  humanity,  made  him  burn  with  the  de- 
L— 6 


82  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

sire  to  overthrow  society  and  carry  men  back  to  that 
state  of  "nature"  which  he  conjured  up  in  his  imagina- 
tion. Are  not  all  the  advantages  of  society,  he  indig- 
nantly asks,  for  the  benefit  of  the  powerful  and  the 
rich?  Are  not  all  lucrative  employments  filled  by  them 
alone?  And  is  not  public  authority  entirely  in  their 
favor?  When  one  of  them  robs  his  creditors  or  com- 
mits other  rascalities,  is  he  not  sure  of  impunity  ?  Are 
not  the  clubbings  that  he  administers,  the  acts  of  vio- 
lence that  he  commits,  the  murders  and  assassinations 
of  which  he  is  guilty,  mere  matters  that  are  hushed  up, 
and  after  six  months  no  longer  mentioned  ? — But  let 
this  same  man  be  robbed,  and  the  entire  police  force  is 
immediately  on  the  alert;  and  woe  to  the  innocent  man 
whom  he  chances  to  suspect. — A  rich  man  has  to  pass  a 
dangerous  place?  See  how  many  escorts  he  has. — The 
axle  of  his  carriage  breaks?  Every  one  flies  to  his  as- 
sistance.— There  is  a  noise  at  his  door?  He  speaks  a 
word,  and  silence  reigns.— The  crowd  incommodes  him  ? 
He  makes  a  sign,  and  the  road  is  clear. — A  wagoner  gets 
in  the  way  of  his  carriage  ?  His  flunkeys  are  ready  to 
beat  the  wagoner  to  death,  and  fifty  honest  pedestrians 
would  be  crushed  under  the  wheels  rather  than  that  the 
gorgeous  equipage  of  one  puppy  should  be  retarded. 
How  different  is  the  picture  of  him  who  is  poor!  The 
more  humanity  owes  him,  the  more  society  refuses  him. 
All  doors  are  closed  to  him,  even  when  he  has  the  right 
to  have  them  opened;  and  if  he  sometimes  obtains  jus- 
tice, he  does  so  with  more  difficulty  than  another  would 
have  in  obtaining  pardon  for  a  crime.  If  there  is  a 
forced  labor  to  be  undertaken,  or  militia  to  be  levied, 
he  is  selected  to  do  it.  In  addition  to  his  own  burden, 
he  bears  that  which  is  shifted  upon  him  by  his  richer 
neighbor.  At  the  least  accident  that  befalls  him,  every 


1750-62.  THE  TYRANNY   OF  POWER.  83 

one  deserts  him.  Let  his  poor  cart  upset,  and  I  hold 
him  lucky  if  he  escapes  the  outrages  of  the  brisk  lackeys 
of  some  young  duke.  In  a  word,  all  free  assistance  flies 
him  in  time  of  need,  for  the  very  reason  that  he  has 
nothing  with  which  to  pay  for  it.  But  I  regard  him  as 
a  ruined  man  if  he  is  so  unfortunate  as  to  have  an 
honorable  spirit,  an  attractive  daughter,  and  a  powerful 
neighbor. — Let  us  sum  up  briefly  the  relations  between 
the  rich  man  and  the  poor  man:  You  have  need  of  me, 
for  I  am  rich  and  you  are  poor.  Let  us  then  make  a  bar- 
gain. I  will  vouchsafe  you  the  honor  of  being  my  servant, 
on  condition  that  you  give  me  what  little  you  have  left, 
to  repay  me  for  the  trouble  I  take  in  lording  it  over  you. 
This  utterance  is  but  one  example  of  the  bitterness 
with  which  Rousseau  attacked  the  existing  order  of 
things.  Nor  can  it  be  denied  that  much  of  what  he 
said  of  civilization  in  general  was  but  too  true  of  the 
rotten  fabric  of  Old  France.  It  may  be  said,  it  has 
been  said,  that  at  the  first  glance  it  might  seem  that 
Rousseau's  imprecations  upon  intellectual  education, 
science,  and  art  were  diametrically  opposed  to  that  spir- 
it which  produced  the  feverish  thirst  for  knowledge 
characteristic  of  the  time.  But  both  movements  were 
revolutionary,  both  were  products  of  the  profound  dis- 
content and  longing  for  some  radical  change  which  per- 
vaded men's  minds  before  the  Revolution.  It  is  ob- 
vious that  the  deep  hatred  of  the  existing  social  sys- 
tem was  common  to  all  the  various  Utopias  that  were 
dreamed  of  by  different  men.  It  is  quite  true  that  all 
kinds  of  enemies  were  using  their  various  weapons  in 
the  attack  on  the  tottering  fortress  of  the  Old  Order; 
that  infantry,  cavalry,  artillery,  regulars,  guerillas,  free 
lances,  high-souled  heroes,  and  stealthy  assassins  made 
each  his  own  species  of  attack,  but  all  attacked. 


84  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

The  living  words  with  which  Rousseau,  with  all  the 
fierce  conviction  of  a  genius  that  neared  to  madness, 
painted  the  ideal  and  idyllic  bliss  and  innocence  of  men 
in  a  "state  of  nature,"  freed  from  the  curses  and  cor- 
ruptions of  civilization,  had  an  absorbing  attraction  for 
men  who  were  vexed  at  every  hour  by  the  privileges, 
the  pomp,  and  the  insolence  of  a  nobility  and  priest- 
hood that  had  ceased  to  perform  their  proper  functions, 
and  lived  by  draining  the  heart's  blood  of  the  people. 
If  Rousseau  did  not  spare  them,  he  did  not  spare  the 
monarchy  in  its  turn.  Society  was  due,  he  said,  to  an 
iniquitous  compact  between  oppressors  and  oppressed, 
which  permitted  a  child  to  govern  old  men,  an  idiot  to 
rule  wise  men,  a  handful  of  men  to  gorge  themselves 
with  dainties,  while  the  famished  multitude  lacked  the 
necessaries  of  life.  For  him  the  whole  occupation  of 
kings  and  their  ministers  had  but  two  aims,  to  extend 
their  domination  without,  and  to  make  it  more  absolute 
within.  When  they  pretended  to  have  other  aims  they 
deceived.  The  expressions,  public  good,  welfare  of  our 
subjects,  glory  of  the  nation,  so  stupidly  employed  in 
public  edicts,  were  ever  the  harbingers  of  disastrous 
measures;  and  the  people  groan  in  advance  when  their 
masters  allude  to  their  paternal  solicitude.  But  Rous- 
seau has  a  remedy  against  tyranny,  for  the  compact  be- 
tween the  governors  and  the  governed  may  be  dissolved; 
the  despot  is  master  only  so  long  as  he  is  stronger  than 
the  people,  and  as  soon  as  they  are  able  to  expel  him,  he 
can  make  no  complaint  of  their  violence.  It  will  always 
be  absurd  for  a  man  to  say  to  a  man,  or  for  a  man  to 
say  to  a  people,  "  I  make  a  contract  with  you  according 
to  which  you  bear  all  the  expenses  and  I  reap  all  the 
profits — a  contract  which  I  will  observe  only  so  long 
as  I  choose,  but  which  you  shall  observe  so  long  as  I 


1750-62.  THE  SUN  OF  FREEMEN.  85 

see  fit."  If  madmen  sign  such  a  treaty,  their  signatures 
are  not  valid.  If  men  who  are  prostrate  upon  the 
ground  with  a  sword  at  their  throats  accept  these  con- 
ditions, their  acceptance  is  null  and  void.  The  idea 
that  men  under  compulsion,  or  madmen,  could  have  con- 
tracted a  thousand  years  ago  for  all  subsequent  gen- 
erations is  absurd.  A  contract  for  a  minor  is  not  bind- 
ing when  he  becomes  an  adult ;  and  when  the  infant  has 
arrived  at  years  of  discretion  he  is  his  own  master.  At 
last  we  are  adults,  and  we  have  only  to  act  like  rational 
men  in  order  to  reduce  to  their  true  value  the  preten- 
sions of  that  authority  which  calls  itself  legitimate.  It 
possesses  power,  nothing  more.  But  a  pistol  in  the 
hands  of  a  highwayman  is  also  a  power  ;  will  you,  he 
asks,  therefore  say  that  I  am  in  duty  bound  to  give  him 
my  purse? — I  yield  only  to  force,  and  will  recapture  my 
purse  as  soon  as  I  can  seize  his  pistol. 

When  Rousseau  declared  war  upon  the  government, 
France  and  Europe  rang  with  applause.  The  day  will 
come,  says  Condorcet,  when  the  sun  will  shine  upon  none 
but  freemen  who  acknowledge  no  master  save  their  rea- 
son ;  when  tyrants  and  slaves,  priests  and  their  stupid 
or  hypocritical  tools,  will  no  longer,  exist,  except  in 
history  and  upon  the  stage  ;  when  men  will  no  longer 
speak  of  them  except  to  pity  their  victims  and  their 
dupes,  to  maintain  a  useful  vigilance  by  recalling  the 
horror  of  their  excesses,  and  to  be  able  to  recognize  and 
to  crush  beneath  the  weight  of  reason  the  first  germs  of 
superstition  and  of  tyranny,  if  they  should  ever  reappear. 
This  was  the  Utopia  of  a  philanthropist  who  was  des- 
tined to  take  poison  in  prison  to  escape  from  men  more 
extreme  than  himself,  eager  to  bring  that  gracious  reader 
of  Horace  to  the  guillotine  !  This  is,  indeed,  one  of  the 
most  tragic  aspects  of  the  Revolution — the  aspect  which 


86  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  V. 

gives  it  at  once  its  fascination  and  its  terror.  If  men 
need  shed  few  tears  over  the  fate  of  insolent  nobles, 
who  thought  no  more  of  driving  over  a  peasant  than  of 
killing  a  mouse,  nor  of  lihertine  bishops,  whose  episcopal 
palaces  were  little  like  Christian  places,  they  mast  needs 
mourn  the  fate  of  those  great-hearted  men  who,  imbued 
with  a  world-wide  philanthropy,  burned  with  a  desire 
to  usher  in  a  millennium  of  bliss  for  oppressed  hu- 
manity, but  awoke  from  their  dreams  to  the  bitter  re- 
ality that  the  populace  were  not  always  the  idyllic  and 
amiable  beings  that  Rousseau  had  painted  them,  but 
occasionally  too  ferocious  and  too  ignorant  to  distinguish 
friend  from  foe. 

It  is  urged  that  the  men  of  whom  Rousseau  speaks  in 
his  famous  book  on  the  "  Social  Contract "  are  not  con- 
crete, tangible  individuals,  but  pure  abstractions,  math- 
ematical units  of  equal  magnitude.  Every  man,  accord- 
ing to  him,  is  by  nature  innocent,  affectionate,  grateful, 
good.  He  is  still  more.  He  is  also  an  entirely  rational 
being— capable  of  assenting  to  a  clear  abstract  prin- 
ciple, and  of  moving  in  the  straight  line  of  logical 
syllogism  from  the  premises  to  the  ultimate  conclusions. 
In  the  dramas,  dialogues,  and  other  writings  of  the  time, 
says  Mr.  Dabney — and  this  is  true  of  other  countries  as 
well  as  of  France  —  appear  gardeners,  jugglers,  peas- 
ants, country  parsons,  philosophers,  tattooed  barbarians, 
and  naked  savages,  all  discoursing,  reasoning,  marching 
in  the  rectilinear  path  of  syllogistic  deduction  from  ab- 
stract ideas.  Rational,  good,  perfectly  equal  and  per- 
fectly free— such  are  the  abstract  entities  which  Rous- 
seau calls  men,  and  who,  he  says,  came  together  at  some 
unknown  epoch  to  make  a  social  contract.  Their  aim. 
in  making  this  contract  was  to  discover  a  form  of  as- 
sociation which  should  defend  with  the  whole  power  of 


1750-62.  ROUSSEAU'S   "SOCIAL   CONTRACT."  87 

the  community  the  person  and  the  property  of  each  as- 
sociate, and  by  which  each  man,  though  uniting  himself 
with  all,  obeyed  in  reality  only  himself,  and  remained 
as  free  as  before.  This  united  assembly  of  abstract 
individuals  is  called  simply  the  State,  when  it  obeys  its 
own  will  or  remains  passive  ;  the  Sovereign,  when  it 
acts  upon  itself  ;  a  Power,  when  compared  with  other 
similar  assemblages.  In  the  same  way  the  individuals 
united  in  a  state  are  called,  when  regarded  collectively, 
the  People  ;  regarded  as  participants  in  the  sovereign 
power,  they  are  called  Citizens  ;  regarded  as  under  the 
necessity  of  obeying  their  own  laws,  that  is,  the  laws  of 
the  state,  they  are  called  Subjects.  All  this  abstract 
juggling  with  words  is  employed  by  Rousseau  in  the 
specious  but  vain  attempt  to  reconcile  the  absolute  free- 
dom of  the  individual  with  his  absolute  obedience  to  the 
will  of  the  majority.  Sovereignty,  he  says,  is  inalienable 
and  indivisible.  The  general  will  can  never  err.  All 
error  arises  from  party  spirit ;  wherefore  societies  and 
corporations  within  the  state  should  be  either  prohibited 
or  so  multiplied  that  no  single  one  can  have  an  appre- 
ciable influence.  "The  sovereign,  consisting  merely  of 
the  sum  of  the  individuals  who  compose  it,  has  and  can 
have  no  interest  opposed  to  theirs  ;  and  conseqxiently 
the  sovereign  power  has  no  need  of  guaranteeing  the 
subjects  against  tyranny,  because  it  is  impossible  that 
a  body  should  desire  to  injure  all  its  members." 

In  all  this  it  is  said  everything  is  abstract.  In  the 
real  world  we  live  in  we  see  concrete  individual  men, 
women,  and  children,  with  different  desires,  different 
passions,  different  intellectual  capacities,  and  different 
moral  characteristics.  Not  so  in  the  ideal  world  which 
issued  from  the  brain  of  Rousseau.  All  his  men  of  the 
social  contract  are  equal,  all  free,  all  good,  all  eager  to 


88  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH,  V. 

obey  cheerfully  the  general  will.  The  people,  not  the 
king,  are  the  sovereign.  The  king  is  but  the  people's 
clerk— nay,  less  than  their  clerk— their  lackey.  The 
contract  between  them  is  not  of  indefinite  duration,  and 
not  one  "  which  can  be  annulled  only  by  mutual  consent, 
or  by  bad  faith  on  the  part  of  one  of  the  contracting 
parties."  By  no  means.  For  "  it  is  contrary,"  says 
Rousseau,  "  to  the  nature  of  the  body  politic  for  the 
sovereign  to  impose  a  law  upon  itself  which  it  can  never 
infringe."  No  sacred  and  inviolable  constitution  to 
bind  the  people  forever !  "  The  right  to  change  the 
constitution  is  the  prime  guarantee  of  all  other  rights." 
"  There  is,  there  can  be,  no  fundamental  law  obligatory 
for  all  time  upon  the  whole  people,  not  even  the  social 
contract."  For  a  prince,  or  an  assembly,  or  magistrates 
to  call  themselves  the  representatives  of  the  people  is 
usurpation  and  falsehood.  Sovereignty  cannot  be  rep- 
resented, for  the  same  reason  that  it  is  inalienable. 
The  moment  a  people  elects  representatives,  it  is  no 
longer  free,  it  no  longer  exists.  The  English,  he  argued, 
imagined  themselves  free,  but  they  were  vastly  mis- 
taken ;  they  were  free  only  during  the  election  of  mem- 
bers of  Parliament ;  so  soon  as  the  election  had  taken 
place,  they  were  slaves,  they  were  nothing.  The  deputies 
of  a  people,  thus,  neither  are  nor  can  be  its  representa- 
tives ;  they  are  only  its  commissioners,  and  can  make  no 
final  conclusions.  Every  law  that  has  not  been  ratified 
by  the  people  directly  is  null  and  void  ;  it  is  not  a  law. 
"  It  is  not  sufficient  that  the  assembled  people  should 
have  fixed  the  constitution  of  the  state  once  by  giving 
its  sanction  to  a  body  of  laws  ;  they  must  hold,  in  ad- 
dition, fixed  and  periodical  assemblies  which  nothing  can 
abolish  or  prorogue,  so  that  on  fixed  days  the  people 
may  legally  assemble  without  the  necessity  of  any  for- 


1750-62.  THE  NEW  SOCIETY.  89 

raal  convocation.  At  the  moment  when  the  people  has 
thus  assembled,  all  jurisdiction  of  the  government  ceases, 
the  executive  power  is  suspended."  Society  starts  again, 
and  the  citizens,  restored  to  their  original  independence, 
renew,  for  so  long  as  they  please,  the  provisional  con- 
tract which  they  had  made  only  for  a  term  of  years. 
"  The  opening  of  these  assemblies,  the  object  of  which 
is  the  maintenance  of  the  social  contract,  should  always 
begin  with  the  decision  of  two  questions  which  should  be 
separately  put  to  the  vote.  The  first  question  is  this  :  Is 
it  the  pleasure  of  the  sovereign  people  to  maintain  the 
present  form  of  government  ?  And  the  second  :  Do  the 
sovereign  people  wish  to  leave  the  administration  in 
the  hands  of  the  present  incumbents?  In  submitting, 
therefore,  to  leaders,  the  sovereign  people  merely  dele- 
gate to  them  a  power  which  they  exercise  in  the  name 
of  the  sovereign  people  whom  they  serve,  but  which  can 
be  modified,  limited,  or  reassuraed  by  the  sovereign  at 
will."  Thus  the  people  possess  not  merely  the  legislative 
power,  which  belongs  to  them,  and  can  only  belong  to 
them,  but  they  delegate  and  take  back  again  at  will  the 
executive  function  as  well.  So  runs  much  of  the  gos- 
pel according  to  Rousseau. 

The  influence  of  Rousseau  in  bringing  about  the  Rev- 
olution can  hardly  be  overrated.  In  the  midst  of  a 
thoroughly  artificial  life,  social  and  political,  he  suddenly 
uplifted  a  voice  of  passion  and  pathos  which  made  itself 
heard  everywhere  and  called  the  men  of  his  time  to 
come  back  to  nature.  It  was  the  cry  of  a  prophet  half 
crazed  by  the  fury  of  his  emotion.  Rousseau  was  in- 
tensely earnest.  He  seemed  like  a  man  who  had  never 
laughed.  He  was  like  one  who  looks  over  life  from 
some  Stylites'  pillar,  but  whose  whole  soul  is  with  the 
writhing,  struggling,  suffering  mortals  he  sees  below 


90  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  V. 

him.  "  Man  is  man's  brother,"  he  cried  out ;  "  in  this 
world  there  are  no  masters  and  no  slaves  ;  or  at  least 
there  should  be  none.  Where  now  there  is  nothing  but 
guilty  luxury  on  one  side,  and  hopeless  misery  on  the 
other,  there  ought  to  be  equality,  love,  brotherhood,  and 
happiness."  He  appealed  to  all  that  was  noblest  in  human 
nature.  He  appealed  to  the  high  as  well  as  the  lowly. 
Most  of  his  arguments  were  absurdities  if  they  were  to 
be  treated  as  philosophic  or  economic  reasonings  ;  but 
he  had  got  tirm  hold  of  his  half  of  the  whole  truth— the 
fact  that  society  was  rotting  because  of  its  artificiality; 
that  artificial  and  not  natural  distinctions  stood  as  bar- 
riers between  one  set  of  men  and  another,  between  all 
men  and  true  happiness.  "  Pull  down  the  artificial 
barriers"  was  one  part  of  his  appeal,  the  part  which 
told  with  most  tremendous  effect.  That  was  what  people 
cared  about ;  they  did  not  much  mind  the  appeal  to 
return  to  nature,  to  the  condition  of  the  natural  man. 
Rousseau,  in  fact,  like  a  great  many  other  philosophers 
of  the  more  poetic  order,  created  a  natural  man  ;  in- 
vented a  being  who  never  had  existence,  a  creature  of 
absolute  truthfulness,  courage,  honesty,  purity,  health, 
and  happiness.  All  the  eloquence  in  the  world  would 
have  failed  to  induce  any  considerable  number  of  people 
to  return  to  the  condition  of  the  natural  man.  They 
could  not  do  it  if  they  would;  and  they  would  not  find 
themselves  any  better  off  even  if  they  could.  All  that 
part  of  Rousseau's  appeal  might  as  well  have  been  called 
out  to  solitude.  But  the  other  part  of  the  appeal  sank 
deep  into  every  ear  which  it  reached.  It  thrilled  con- 
viction into  hearts  and  minds.  The  rich  and  privileged 
themselves  admitted  its  justice  and  its  sincerity.  The 
broad  principles  of  Rousseau  became  positively  fash- 
ionable among  the  aristocracy  of  France.  Great  ladies 


1712-76.  "THE   APOSTLE   OF   AFFLICTION."  91 

in  the  splendid  salons  of  Paris  raved  about  the  new  proph- 
et— "the  apostle  of  affliction,"  as  Byron  so  happily  styled 
him.  Among  the  oppressed  all  over  France  his  eloquence 
brought  into  flame  a  resentment  that  before  had  been 
only  smouldering  in  vagueness  and  the  dark.  To  them 
it  told  of  the  wrongs  heaped  for  so  many  generations 
on  them  and  on  theirs;  it  put  before  them  a  picture  of 
what  they  actually  were,  and  side  by  side  with  that  a 
picture  of  what  they  might  be  and  what  they  ought  to 
be.  It  dinned  into  their  ears  the  too  terrible  truth  that 
not  natural  laws  of  any  kind,  but  purely  artificial  reg- 
ulations were  answerable  for  all  that  misery  with  which 
a  whole  nation  was  accursed.  "  Down  with  the  artificial 
barriers  !"  was  the  refrain  of  every  appeal.  Rousseau 
did  not  mean  revolution  by  force.  He  was  not  thinking 
of  that.  He  wanted  the  whole  people — princes,  peers, 
peasants,  and  paupers  alike — to  reform  themselves  by  a 
common  effort.  Nor  is  it  by  any  means  impossible  that 
his  genius,  his  energy,  his  passion  might  have  done  much 
to  bring  about  such  a  great  moral  and  social  revolution 
— if  only  events  could  wait.  But  events  could  not  wait. 
The  growth  of  the  moral  revolution  would  have  been 
too  slow.  Things  had  gone  too  far.  So  when  the  other 
revolution  began  to  show  itself  the  people  remembered 
what  Rousseau  had  taught  about  the  artificial  barriers, 
and  they  levelled  them  with  a  crash  which  is  echoing 
even  still  through  Europe.  Rousseau  had  many  faults 
both  as  a  writer  and  as  a  man.  But  as  a  writer  he  was 
endowed  with  a  power  of  eloquence  and  of  pity  such  as 
has  rarely  in  the  history  of  the  world  poured  forth  from 
platform  or  from  pulpit.  As  a  man  he  was  filled  by  what 
a  great  English  statesman  of  our  own  day,  speaking  of 
another  reformer,  not  Rousseau,  called  "  a  passion  of  phi- 
lanthropy." That  one  merit  almost  empties  him  of  faults. 


92 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VI. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE    POMPADOUR. 

A  NEW  influence  had  already  ta'ken  its  place  in  social 
and  political  life.  The  middle  classes,  the  high  bour- 
geoisie, financiers,  farmer -generals,  commercial  giants, 
had  taken  their  prominent  place  in  the  state,  rivalling 
and  overgrowing  the  nobility  in  the  influence  of  their 
wealth  and  enterprise.  The  great  names  of  France  are 
no  longer  the  names  of  old  and  illustrious  families  alone  ; 
they  are  the  names  of  a  Bergeret,  of  a  Brissart,  of  a 
Bouret,  of  a  Bragousse,  of  a  Camuzet,  of  a  Gaze,  of  a 
Chevalier,  of  a  Gaillard,  of  a  Delahaye,  of  a  Delaporte, 
of  a  Dupin,  of  a  D'Arnoncourt,  of  a  De  Villemur,  of  a 
Grimod,  of  an  Helvetius,  of  a  L'Allement  de  Nantouille, 
of  a  Le  Riche  de  la  Popeliniere,  of  a  Lenormant  de 
Tournehem,  of  a  Rolland,  of  a  Savalette,  of  a  Thiboux. 
These  are  the  men  of  the  enormous  fortunes  who  are 
forcing  their  way  to  the  front,  who  are  building  them- 
selves palaces,  whose  luxury  eclipses  the  pride  of  princes, 
who  are  getting  the  offices  of  the  state  within  their  in- 
fluence, who  are  marrying  their  daughters  to  the  bluest 
blood  and  the  noblest  names  of  France.  They  are  the 
patrons  of  the  arts  ;  the  painter,  the  poet,  the  man  of 
letters,  the  wit,  the  philosopher,  the  sculptor,  the  archi- 
tect, throng  tlVeir  antechambers,  compete  for  their  fa- 
vors, and  laud  their  names.  The  part  of  Maecenas  is 
played  by  some  wealthy  man  of  business  who  began 
life  in  a  counting-house  or  a  wine-shop,  and  whom  poets 


1721.  MONSIEUR  AND   MADAME   POISSON.  93 

will  gladly  hail  as  "dulce  decus  meum,"  heedless  of 
the  absence  of  kingly  ancestors. 

The  Pompadour  offers  to  the  world  a  further  proof 
of  the  triumphs  of  the  bourgeoisie.  She  was  the  daugh- 
ter of  a  gentleman  of  the  unpoetic  name  of  Poisson, 
who  had  been  sentenced,  not  undeservedly,  to  be  hanged 
for  malversation,  but  had  saved  his  neck  by  a  self- 
imposed  exile.  Honest  or  dishonest,  rogue  Poisson  did 
get  back  to  France  after  a  time,  did  succeed  by  desper- 
ate pushes  of  court  favor  in  preserving  his  neck  un- 
twisted. It  would  have  been  a  worse  thing  for  Sieur 
Poisson,  but  an  infinitely  better  thing  for  France,  if  the 
hanging  had  been  duly  and  decorously  effected,  and 
effected  before  Madame  Poisson  had  borne  him  a  fair 
daughter  ;  though,  indeed,  upon  due  reflection  we  must 
admit  that  the  hangman's  fingers  would  have  saved 
France  no  whit.  Madame  Poisson  was  a  lady  of  the 
lightest  possible  character ;  she  was  involved  at  the 
time  of  the  Pompadour's  birth  in  an  intrigue  with  Le- 
normant  de  Tournebem,  who,  no  mean  authority  on  the 
matter,  considered  himself  to  be  the  girl's  sire.  He 
manifested  for  her  all  the  affection  of  a  father,  provided 
for  her  education  in  the  most  liberal  way ;  if  he  had 
set  himself  the  task  of  preparing  a  morsel  for  a  king  he 
could  hardly  have  better  set  about  it.  All  that  the  art, 
the  culture,  the  polite  muses  of  the  age  could  do  for 
Mademoiselle  Poisson  they  were  called  upon  by  Le- 
normant  de  Tournehem  to  do.  No  expense  was  spared 
in  procuring  her  the  best  masters  in  all  departments  of 
social  art.  Guibaudet  had  taught  her  how  to  dance — 
Guibaudet  the  illustrious  ;  Jeliotte  had  taught  her  to 
sing  ;  she  danced,  we  are  told,  as  well  any  dancing-girl 
of  the  Opera ;  she  sang  as  well  as  any  professional  sing- 
er, and  Georges  Leroy  quoted  against  her  the  saying  of 


94  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VI. 

Sallust  concerning  Fulvia,  that  "she  danced  and  sang 
better  than  was  becoming  to  a  decent  woman."  The 
instruction  that  money  could  not  buy,  friendship  gave. 
Crebillon  deigned  to  teach  her  elocution,  to  instruct 
her  in  the  acquirement  of  a  perfect  diction.  She  learned 
to  draw,  to  paint,  to  back  a  horse  with  more  than  com- 
mon skill,  to  touch  the  harpsichord  with  distinction,  to 
engrave.  She  ran  the  gamut  of  all  the  accomplishments 
betitting  a  great  lady  in  an  age  that  liked  its  great  ladies 
to  be,  or  to  seem  to  be,  cultured.  She  refined  and  tem- 
pered her  quick  intelligence  in  the  society  of  men  of  let- 
ters, men  of  wit ;  she  spared  no  pains,  and  no  pains  were 
spared  for  her,  to  make  herself  as  attractive  as  possible, 
to  heighten  the  effect  of  her  physical  beauty  by  the 
ornament  of  a  many-sided  culture.  Whatever  she  did, 
she  did  well ;  her  singing  and  playing  were  the  rage  in 
the  little  social  court  of  which  she  was  the  acknowl- 
edged queen.  Thanks  to  Lenormant  de  Tournehem, 
she  was  fairly  launched  upon  the  glittering  sea  of 
wealthy  Parisian  society  ;  thanks  again  to  his  fostering 
care,  she  solidified  her  position  by  a  wealthy  marriage 
with  his  nephew,  Lenormant  d'£tioles.  Her  husband 
was  not  a  comely  man,  and  she  does  not  seem  to  have 
professed  to  care  much  about  him.  Her  marriage  with 
him  was  to  her  but  one  step  in  the  career  which  was  to 
bring  her  so  near  the  throne. 

For  the  curious  thing  about  the  woman  is  that  she 
seems  to  have  been  early  inspired  with  the  laudable 
ambition  to  become  the  king's  mistress.  It  would  al- 
most seem  as  if  she  took  all  the  labor  and  pains  to  make 
herself  so  brilliantly  accomplished  solely  that  she  might 
become  in  fulness  of  time  the  mistress  of  the  Well- 
beloved  King.  While  she  was  yet  a  little  girl  Madame 
Lebon  prophesied  that  she  would  become  the  mistress  of 


1741.  MADAME   LEXORMANT   D'ETIOLES.  95 

Louis  XV.,  and  the  prophecy  seems  to  have  exercised 
its  guiding  influence  upon  all  her  life.  There  is  some- 
thing melancholy  to  the  moral,  something  entertaining 
to  the  cynical,  in  this  picture  of  a  girl  slowly  growing 
up  into  beauty  and  culture,  and  informed  during  all  the 
years  of  her  young  maidenhood  and  all  the  years  of  her 
young  married  life  with  the  one  desire,  the  one  hope, 
the  one  purpose  of  becoming  the  mistress  of  a  satyr 
king.  Soon  after  her  marriage  she  said  with  a  smile 
to  some  talk  of  love  and  lovers  that  the  king  alone  in 
all  the  world  could  shake  her  fidelity  to  her  husband. 
The  hearer  thought,  no  doubt,  that  the  fair  D'^iioles 
was  jesting  ;  but  the  fair  D'fitioles  was  perfectly  se- 
rious. She  would  not  be  unfaithful  to  her  husband 
with  any  save  the  king,  not  because  she  thought  the 
king  so  hopelessly  out  of  her  star  that  the  saying  in 
itself  implied  eternal  fidelity,  but  because  she  meant  to 
be  unfaithful  to  him  with  the  king.  It  was  a  daring 
ambition  even  for  the  spoiled  child  of  the  wealthy  bour- 
geoisie. 

From  the  moment  of  her  marriage  in  1741  Madame 
Lenormant  d'lStioles  set  herself  to  captivate  the  king. 
She  crossed  his  path  whenever  she  could,  she  sought  to 
fire  his  voluptuous  imagination  with  the  vision  of  a  rare 
and  radiant  .creature,  always  beautifully  attired,  always 
smiling,  always  dazzling  the  world  with  her  beauty  and 
her  wit.  In  the  royal  hunts  at  Senart  Wood  she  flitted 
before  the  kingly  eyes  a  Boucheresque  Diana  very  much 
to  the  indignation  of  Juno  (Jhateauroux,  who,  discern- 
ing a  rival,  and  a  dangerous  rival,  sternly  banished  the 
beautiful  Diana  from  the  royal  hunt.  The  banished 
Diana  bided  her  time.  She  could  not  afford  to  fight 
against  Madame  de  Chateauroux,  but  she  could  very 
well  afford  to  wait.  There  came  a  moment  when  it 


96 


THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  VI. 


seemed  as  if  she  had  waited  in  vain,  as  if  the  prophecy 
of  her  youth  had  cheated  her.  When  Louis  lay  nigh 
unto  death  with  that  malignant  fever  at  Metz,  no  heart 
in  all  the  kingdom,  not  even  Chateauroux's,  can  have 
mourned  for  the  ailing  king  more  than  Madame  Lenor- 
mant  d'JStioles.  But  the  very  fever  helped  her.  Under 
its  influence  Louis  was  persuaded  to  banish  Madame  de 
Chateauroux  from  his  presence,  and  Madame  de  Cba- 
teauroux  did  not  long  survive  the  banishment.  Louis 
recovered,  earned  his  title  of  Well-beloved,  and  the  way 
was  clear  for  the  ambition  of  the  younger  Poisson.  She 
had  underground  influence  at  court,  and  she  plied  it 
hard  ;  a  faithful  Binet,  a  faithful  Bridge,  an  industrious 
Madame  de  Tencin  pushed  her  cause.  She  appeared 
at  a  masked  ball  before  the  king,  teasing  and  tempting 
him  with  her  wit  and  her  beauty.  She  dropped  her 
handkerchief,  Louis  picked  it  up,  and  every  one  said 
that  the  Sultan  had  thrown  the  handkerchief.  Yet  still 
Louis  hung  fire,  even  after  a  supper-party  where  the 
royal  delight  in  Madame's  physical  beauty  was  counter- 
balanced by  a  vague  alarm  at  certain  ambitious  notes 
in  her  intellect.  A  bishop,  too,  made  his  appearance  in 
the  game,  Boyer,  Bishop  of  Mirepoix,  doing  his  best  to 
prevent  the  threatened  conjunction.  But  the  stars  were 
on  the  woman's  side;  there  was  another  intimate  sup- 
per; Madame  d'lStioles  was  divinely  charming,  discreet- 
ly unambitious.  But  even  while  she  welcomed  the 
king's  affection  she  painted  such  a  terrible  picture  of 
the  murderous  fury  of  her  deceived  husband  that  she 
persuaded  Louis  to  allow  her  to  hide  herself  in  a  corner 
of  Versailles  palace  in  the  rooms  that  had  belonged  to' 
Madame  de  Mailly.  .Once  fairly  installed  in  Versailles, 
Madame  d'^tioles  was  not  the  woman  lightly  to  leave 
it.  The  unlucky  husband  was  in  despair,  talked  of 


1745-64.  MADAME   DE   POMPADOUR.  97 

killing  himself,  talked  of  tearing  his  false  wife  from 
the  king's  arms.  Then  passing  from  the  tragic  mood 
to  the  pathetic,  he  wrote  a  letter  to  the  mistress  implor- 
ing her  to  return  to  him.  Luckless,  diminutive,  un- 
comely D'Etioles,  what  words  of  his,  though  he  spoke 
with  the  speech  of  angels,  would  have  brought  her 
back  to  him  now  !  She  read  the  letter  composedly,  and 
handed  it  to  Louis  to  laugh  at.  Louis,  who  had  some 
of  the  instincts  of  a  gentleman,  said,  after  reading  it, 
"  Your  husband,  madame,  is  a  very  worthy  man."  But, 
worthy  or  no,  he  was  sent  away  from  Paris  into  a  kind 
of  exile,  and  Madame  d'lCtioles  had  won  the  first  trick 
in  her  great  game. 

The  other  tricks  she  took  rapidly.  She  was  soon 
made  Madame  de  Pompadour.  She  was  presented  at 
court  and  received  with  a  strange  melancholy  civility  by 
the  queen,  and  with  cold  indifference  by  the  dauphin. 
In  a  moment,  as  it  were,  she  became  the  central  figure 
in  the  state.  A  party  was  formed  against  her,  fierce, 
virulent,  and  persistent.  A  party  was  formed  for  her, 
a  party  of  all  those  who  live  by  the  favor  of  favorites, 
of  all  who  thought  to  influence  the  king  through  the 
mistress,  a  party  as  virulent  and  unscrupulous  as  its 
opponent.  Roughly  speaking,  outraged  virtue  counted 
for  little  or  nothing  in  the  attacks  upon  and  the  in- 
trigues against  the  new  favorite.  Indignation  was 
chiefly  aroused  by  the  facts  of  her  birth  and  station. 
Hitherto  the  recognized  mistresses  of  the  king  had  been 
ladies  of  the  noble  order,  ladies  of  name  and  race.  In 
one  case  the  king  did  a  stately  family  the  honor  of 
raising  all  its  daughters  in  turn  to  the  purple.  But  to 
take  a  recognized  mistress  from  the  middle  classes,  from 
the  third  estate,  from  the  bourgeoisie,  to  elevate  a  lady 
whose  maiden  name  was  Poisson,  and  whose  married 
I.— 1 


its 


THE  FKENCII   REVOLUTION.  Cu.  VI. 


name  was  Lenormant,  this  was  indeed  an  outrage  upon 
decency  and  upon  civilization.  As  a  matter  of  policy 
it  certainly  was  imprudent.  It  broke  down  one  of  the 
barriers  of  prestige  with  which  the  Old  Order  fenced 
itself  from  attack. 

Whatever  else  the  reign  of  Pompadour  may  have 
been,  it  was  undoubtedly  an  Augustan  epoch  for  the 
arts.  It  is  usually  in  a  period  of  decadence  that  the 
fine  arts  are  most  passionately  cultivated,  that  the  most 
eager  attention  is  given  to  all  the  fair  details  of  life — 
to  exquisite  architecture,  to  highly  wrought  literature, 
to  decorative  painting  and  sculpture,  to  delicate  handi- 
craft of  all  kinds,  to  engraving,  to  verse-making,  to  the 
binding  of  books.  The  courtly  poets  clustered  round 
Madame  de  Pompadour  like  bees  around  a  comb;  they 
sang  her  praises  with  the  sickly  classicism  of  the  time. 
A  court  poet  is  usually  an  odious  creature,  but  he  seems 
nowhere  more  pitiful  than  when  he  is  cutting  his  apish 
capers  to  win  the  smile  of  some  royal  mistress.  The 
brazen  Abbe  de  Bernis,  leering  over  his  triple  chin, 
clung  to  the  Pompadour's  skirts  and  saved  himself  from 
shipwreck.  Naturally  he  was  grateful  to  his  patroness, 
and  he  reeled  off  a  world  of  insipid  verses  in  her  honor. 
Bernis  is  the  stage  abbe  of  the  eighteenth  century,  witty, 
mean,  voluptuous,  neat  at  epigram,  quick  in  turning  a 
madrigal,  great  at  a  lady's  toilet-table,  great  at  a  rich 
man's  banquet,  suave,  supple,  smiling,  servile,  Epicurean 
in  a  sense  which  would  have  made  Epicurus  despair, 
pagan  only  in  the  baser  way,  a  miserable  creature. 
There  was  nothing  better  for  such  a  fellow  to  do  than 
to  sing  of  Madame  de  Pompadour's  dimples,  and  he  sang 
of  them  with  nauseating,  wearisome  iterance  which 
might  have  disgusted  even  the  woman  to  whom  they 
were  offered. 


1745-64.  "POMPADOUR  FECIT."  99 

The  luxurious,  the  decorative  ai'ts  flourished  under 
her  sway.  All  the  costly  elegancies  of  life  were  dear 
to  her,  the  potteries  of  China  and  Japan,  the  porcelain 
of  Dresden,  the  glass  work  of  Venice.  Under  her  pat- 
ronage the  porcelain  of  Sevres  rose  into  triumphant 
rivalry  with  the  skill  of  Saxony  and  the  genius  of  the 
East.  The  condescension  of  Madame  de  Pompadour, 
gave  to  the  master  workers  of  Sevres  a  palace  wherein 
to  live  and  labor,  a  domain  in  which  to  rest  and  recreate. 
The  artists  of  Sevres,  like  the  glass- workers,  were  graced 
with  the  right  to  hunt,  and  they  could  avail  themselves 
of  the  privilege  in  the  Sevres  woods  after  their  long 
hours  in  the  work-rooms — long  hours  sometimes  shared 
by  Madame  de  Pompadour,  who  loved  to  come  to  Sevres 
to  assist  in  the  choice  of  tints,  and  to  supply  her  colo- 
ny with  designs  of  her  own  composition.  Madame  de 
Pompadour  loved  to  play  at  art,  loved  to  be  thought  an 
artist.  The  lovers  of  the  art  of  the  last  century  delight 
in  the  slender  folio  which  bears  the  title  "  L'CEuvre  de 
la  Marquise  de  Pompadour,"  in  which  her  own  designs, 
signed  "  Pompadour  fecit,"  mingle  with  her  reproduc- 
tions of  the  designs  of  others,  inscribed  "  Pompadour 
sculpsit,"  and  with  examples  of  her  love  for  gems  graven 
after  the  fashion  of  the  antique.  The  nymphs  and 
satyrs,  the  vines  and  children-cupids  of  the  last-century 
antique,  have  a  peculiar  charm  of  association  when  they 
are  designed  by  Madame  de  Pompadour. 

She  had  a  great  affection,  too,  for  binding,  for  that  ex- 
quisite art  which  reached  perhaps  in  the  last  century  its 
highest  point.  Under  her  patronage  flourished  Pade- 
loup,  the  great  Antoine  Michel  Padeloup,  binder  for 
kings  and  king  among  binders.  Louis  Douceur,  Pade- 
loup's  contemporary,  Padeloup's  rival  in  the  affections 
of  the  great,  designed  for  Madame  de  Pompadour  a 


100  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  On.  VI. 

blotting-book  which  is  held  by  the  learned  to  be  the  mas- 
terpiece of  his  art.  M.  Leon  Gruel,  the  bookbinder  and 
historian  of  bookbinders,  sighs  quaintly  for  the  secrets 
that  have  lain  beneath  the  covers  of  that  book  of  citron 
morocco,  wrought  with  Douceur's  favorite  lace  design, 
"A  petits  fers,"  and  emblazoned  with  the  arms  of  Ma- 
dame de  Pompadour,  the  three  castles  on  the  escutcheon. 
Who,  he  asks,  will  tell  us  the  secrets  that  this  blotting- 
book  has  held  ?  Think  that  she  for  whom  it  was  fash- 
ioned lived  for  twenty  years  the  uncontested  mistress  of 
the  destinies  of  France  !  Why  cannot  things  of  this 
nature  speak  and  tell  us  of  all  that  they  have  seen  ? 
So  the  master  binder  bemoans,  and  yet  that  blotting- 
book  has  its  voice  too,  and  bears  its  testimony  to  the 
innate  love  for  beauty,  for  luxury,  for  exquisite  refine- 
ment of  all  artistic  workmanship,  which  is  the  especial 
characteristic  of  the  Pompadour  epoch. 

Literature  as  well  as  art  received  her  patronage.  Her 
library  was  large,  not  from  affectation.  She  sought  cult- 
ure in  all  directions;  she  was  as  eager  to  enrich  her  mind 
as  to  adorn  her  body,  and  the  range  of  her  reading  was 
wide  and  varied.  In  history,  in  theology,  in  philosophy, 
her  shelves  were  richly  stored,  for  she  felt  an  interest 
in  all  the  creeds  and  all  the  scepticisms.  Her  love  for 
the  stage  displayed  itself  in  her  splendid  collection  of 
theatrical  works  from  the  earliest  dawn  of  the  drama  in 
France  to  the  lightest  court  ballet  that  was  footed  before 
the  eyes  of  Louis  XV.  Nor  was  romance  forgotten.  It 
is  a  curious  proof  of  the  many-sided  nature  of  the  woman 
that  in  an  age  so  gracefully  artificial,  so  daintily  gallant, 
she  delighted  in  the  rough  old  Carlovingian  epics  and 
the  frank  vigor  of  the  legends  of  the  Round  Table.  It 
must  be  remembered  to  Madame  de  Pompadour's  honor 
that  the  patroness  of  Marmontel  was  the  means  of  giv- 


1762.  THE  FALL   OF   THE   JESUITS.  101 

ing  the  concluding  part  of  Galland's  "  Mille  et  une  Nuits  " 
to  the  world,  and  that  the  goddess  of  Crebillon  the 
elder  could  take  pleasure  in  the  deeds  of  Roland  and 
the  loves  of  Lancelot  of  the  Lake. 

Yet  the  long  period  of  Madame  de  Pompadour's  sway 
over  France  is  an  unexhilarating  study  of  public  inde- 
cency, incapacity,  and  injustice.  To  her  and  to  her 
creature,  Controller-General  Machault,  France  owed  the 
ruinous  invention  of  those  "  acquits  au  comptant,"  those 
bills  at  sight  upon  the  king's  signature  which  had  always 
to  be  met  and  never  to  be  explained  or  justified.  Dur- 
ing her  reign  the  religious  war  raged  with  a  new  ferocity. 
Madame  de  Pompadour  declared  war  upon  the  Jesuits, 
who,  triumphing  in  the  blows  they  had  dealt  to  a  reeling 
Jansenism,  thought  they  could  successfully  defy  the 
new  influence  at  the  foot  of  the  throne.  They  were 
mistaken.  The  brilliant  minister  Choiseul  was  their 
enemy;  Madame  de  Pompadour  was  their  enemy;  the 
philosophers,  the  Encyclopaedists  were  their  enemies. 
An  alliance  stronger  than  Jansenism  ever  could  rally  to 
its  standards  was  formed  against  the  Jesuits;  blow  after 
blow  fell  upon  them  with  significant  success  :  in  1762 
the  order  was  formally  abolished  by  the  Paris  Parlia- 
ment, its  vast  property  confiscated  to  the  crown,  and 
its  members  secularized.  Madame  de  Pompadour's  tri- 
umph was  great;  she  had  done  to  the  Jesuits  as  they 
had  done  to  the  Jansenists.  But  if  their  defeat  was  a 
triumph  for  Madame  de  Pompadour,  the  years  of  her 
sway  record  few  triumphs  for  France.  The  loss  of  the 
French  colonies  in  Canada  to  the  English,  the  fatal  alli- 
ance with  Austria,  with  its  sequel  of  calamities,  the  crush- 
ing naval  defeats  at  Lagos  and  Belleisle,  the  disastrous 
Carrickfergus  expedition,  the  pitiful  Peace  of  Paris — 
these  are  the  jewels  in  the  crown  of  the  Pompadour 


102  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VI. 

glory.  She  died  in  the  April  of  1764,  being  only  forty- 
four  years  of  age.  During  all  the  years  in  which  she 
had  lived  with  the  king  she  had  kept  her  influence  over 
him  unimpaired,  and  had  used  that  influence  most  evilly 
for  France.  Madame  de  Pompadour  was  not  a  great 
woman;  she  was  the  mistress  of  a  very  worthless  king. 
But  bad  and  base  as  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  was,  when 
the  king  was  reigned  over  by  Madame  de  Pompadour 
it  was  a  reign  fruitful  in  new  and  great  influences  in 
art  and  letters  and  thought.  If  Pompadour  patronized 
Padeloup,  she  also  patronized  Voltaire,  and  under  the 
shadow,  as  it  were,  of  the  genius  of  Voltaire  the  set  of 
men  grew  into  public  attention  who  were  the  very  imme- 
diate precursors  of  the  Revolution;  while  a  thinker  of  a 
very  different  school  was  calling  upon  civilization  at 
large  to  shake  off  its  superstitions  and  return  to  the 
sylvan  savagery  of  the  early  man.  Voltaire  and  the 
Encyclopaedists  on  the  one  side,  Rousseau  and  the  fol- 
lowers of  Rousseau  on  the  other,  represent  two  irrecon- 
cilable influences,  which  had,  however,  the  same  effect 
of  making  directly  for  Revolution.  No  two  publica- 
tions have  ever  influenced  their  own  times  more  directly 
than  the  famous  "Encyclopaedia"  and  the  no  less  fam- 
ous "Social  Contract."  No  two  publications  had  more 
direct  effect  in  undermining  the  whole  existing  condi- 
tions of  social  order,  and  in  advancing  that  new  con- 
dition of  things  which  -was  to  begin  with  the  National 
Assembly,  and  to  end— where  ?  The  Encyclopedists 
sprang  into  existence  under  the  fostering  influence  of 
Voltaire.  Voltaire,  who  was  a  sceptic  but  not  an  atheist, 
though  he  has  often  and  absurdly  'been  called  so,  was 
the  leader  of  a  school  of  thinkers  many  of  whom  were, 
so  far  as  the  term  is  ever  applicable  to  philosophic  think- 
ers, atheists.  Rousseau  was  horrified  by  any  suggestion 


1764-68.  MISTRESS  AND   QUEEN.  103 

of  atheism;  he  was  an  impassioned  Deist,  and  Deism 
was  the  creed  of  his  consistent  followers,  was  the  creed 
of  that  consistent,  most  curious  follower,  Maximilien 
Robespierre. 

Bad  too  as  was  the  epoch  of  Madame  de  Pompadour, 
it  had  at  least  the  merit  of  being  better  than  the  epoch 
that  followed  it.  Four  years  later,  two  years  after  the 
death  of  Stanislas  had  united  Lorraine  to  France,  un- 
happy Maria  Leszczynska  died,  and  afforded  Louis  XV. 
the  opportunity  for  a  famous  display  of  false  sentimen- 
tality. He  bewailed  ludicrously  enough  the  woman  he 
had  outraged  and  insulted  all  her  life,  and  for  a  brief 
period  he  played  a  sickening  comedy  of  repentance  and 
reform.  It  did  not  last  long.  Maria  Leszczynska  was 
not  a  year  in  her  grave  when  Louis,  reeling  along  the 
familiar  road  of  royal  debaucheries,  found  in  his  path 
his  fate  aud  the  fate  of  France  in  the  person  of  the  Du 
Barry. 


104  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION-  CH.  VII. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

"HOW    WILL   BEERY    PULL    THROUGH?" 

His  Well-beloved  Majesty  Louis  XV.  had  a  certain 
sardonic  humor  of  his  own.     His  phrase  about  the  Del- 
uge was  the  epigrammatic  summary  of  his  own  policy 
of  pleasure  and  despair.     Scarcely  less  epigrammatic, 
scarcely  less  significant,  is  another  of  the  royal  sayings. 
"  When  I  am  gone,"  he  asks,  and  the  words  are  under- 
lined with  a  sneer,  "  I  should  like  very  much  to  know 
how  Berry  will  pull  through  with  it."    The  Berry  of  this 
bitter  saying  was  the  Dauphin  of  France,  for  whom 
destiny  was  reserving  the  crown  and  title  of  Louis  XVI. 
The  second  son  of  Louis  the  Dauphin,  son  of  Louis  XV., 
death  had  steadily  removed  all  obstacles  to  his  succession. 
In  1765,  when  he  was  only  e.leven  years  old,  his  father 
died  with  the  strange  Roman  words  upon  his  lips,  "  How 
astoundingly  easy  it  is  to  die  !"     The  little  newly  made 
dauphin  was  immediately  brought  to  Louis  XV.  and 
announced  as  "  M.  le  Dauphin,"  and  Louis  is  reported 
to  have  uttered  some  sentimental  expressions  of  pity  for 
poor  France  with  a  king  of  fifty-five  and  a  dauphin  of 
eleven.     The  time  was  yet  to  come  when  the  poor  little 
dauphin  of  eleven  might  envy  that  elder  brother  of  his 
who  died  in  1761,  leaving  it  to  his  brother  Berry  to 
become  the  heir  of  France.     Louis  XV.  did  not  love 
the  new  dauphin,  and  always  persisted  in  calling  him 
"Berry,"  as  if,  with  that  kingly  impression  that  words 
are  as  good  as  things,  if  not  better,  the  calling  the  child 


176?.  PLOT  AND  POISON.  105 

by  another  than  his  rightful  title  would  in  some  way 
relieve  Louis  from  the  dislike  of  regarding  in  him  the 
future  sovereign. 

When  little  Louis  was  thirteen  years  old  his  mother 
died,  poisoned,  as  she  declared  and  as  many  believed. 
The  dread  of  poison  was  common  in  the  court  of  France 
for  many  reigns,  and  any  death  at  all  suspicious  or  not 
easily  explicable  was  sure  to  be  set  down  to  plot  and 
to  poison.  Popular  clamor  inside  the  court,  popular 
rumor  outside  the  court,  not  merely  asserted  that  the 
dauphiness  died  poisoned,  but  named  the  instigator  of 
the  crime,  the  arch-poisoner,  and  even  named  his  tool. 
Choiseul,  so  rumor  said  —  and  all  the  tongues  with 
which  its  garment  is  traditionally  painted  talked  this 
thing  loudly — Choiseul  was  the  arch-poisoner;  Lieutaud, 
the  court  physician,  was  the  no  less  criminal  tool.  Lieu- 
taud, the  court  physician,  took  a  curious  method  of  reply- 
ing to  the  rumors.  He  published  his  "Medecine  Pra- 
tique," with  a  picture  representing  his  version  of  a  classic 
story,  according  to  which  the  physician  of  Alexander, 
accused  of  planning  to  poison  his  royal  master,  drank 
off  himself  the  draught  he  had  prepared.  As  for  Choi- 
seul, he  held  his  head  high  and  defied  rumor.  But 
rumor,  and  such  rumor,  was  very  advantageous  for 
political  purposes.  It  strengthened  tremendously  the 
hands  of  Choiseul's  malignant,  strenuous  rival,  the  Duke 
d'Aguillon,  and  his  faction ;  very  possibly  it  was  through 
this  rumor  that  such  influence  as  the  young  dauphin 
possessed  passed  into  the  hands  of  the  D'Aguillon  party. 
It  seems  certain  that  Louis  XVI. 's  repugnance  to  Choi- 
seul was  largely  inspired  by  the  impression  made  upon 
his  childish  mind  that  in  Choiseul  he  beheld  the  mur- 
derer of  his  father  and  mother. 

Louis  XV.  had  the  least  possible  affection  for  his 


10g  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VII 

grandson.  He  saw  in  him  the  most  inappropriate  suc- 
cessor, the  most  unkingly  person,  according  to  his  ideas 
of  kingliness,  that  could  wait  for  a  dead  king's  crown. 
A  young  gentleman  who  was  ambitious  to  be  remembered 
in  history  as  "  Louis  le  Severe  "  had  obviously  little  in 
common  with  the  man  of  many  mistresses.  Perhaps  the 
king,  who  was  so  fond  of  cooking  and  wood-turning, 
might  have  felt  some  sympathy  with  the  grandson  whose 
most  pronounced  tastes  were  in  favor  of  amateur  lock- 
making  and  hunting.  But  the  cold  respectability  of 
grandson  Louis's  mind,  the  unattractive  awkwardness  of 
grandson  Louis's  body,  the  blundering  shyness  of  grand- 
son Louis's  bearing,  were  all  so  many  insurmountable 
barriers  to  sympathy  between  Louis  XV.  and  the  Dau- 
phin of  France. 

Everything  about  the  young  prince  betokened  a  bour- 
geois mind,  a  nature  inspired  by  all  the  bourgeois  virtues 
and  marred  by  not  a  few  of  the  bourgeois  vices.  He 
was  well-educated  in  a  commonplace  way;  he  could  read 
English  well  and  hate  England  well;  he  had  a  pretty 
taste  in  geography;  he  loved  making  locks,  and  practised 
it  later,  to  his  cost,  with  a  scoundrelly  locksmith  named 
Gamain ;  he  liked  looking  through  telescopes  with  his 
shortsighted  eyes  ;  he  liked  orderliness,  formality,  regu- 
larity; he  was  great  at  commonplace-books,  classified 
extracts,  compilations;  he  was  grotesquely  economical 
where  economy  was  of  no  importance;  he  had  a  certain 
affection  for  the  character  of  Richard  III.  of  England, 
whom  he  considered  to  be  a  most  ill  -  used  man.  To 
this  commonplace,  dull,  respectable  bourgeois  prince  the 
destiny  that  watches  over  princes  gave  as  a  wife  the 
most  unsuitable  woman  in  the  world,  the  beautiful  Marie 
Antoinette  of  Austria. 

Maria  Theresa,  ambitious  daughter  of  the  Pragmatic 


1754-70.  MARIE   ANTOINETTE.  107 

Sanction,  ambitious  mistress  of  the  partition  of  Poland, 
dreamed  of  an  alliance  with  France.  The  dream  was 
fostered  by  Kaunitz,  it  pleased  the  mind  of  Louis  XV.; 
it  was  decided  that  the  grandson  of  the  French  king 
should  marry  the  youngest  daughter  of  the  Austrian 
empress.  Marie  Antoinette,  who  was  born  on  No- 
vember 2,  1755,  was  the  last  of  the  sixteen  children  that 
Maria  Theresa  bore  to  her  husband,  Francis  I.  It  is  re- 
corded that  on  the  day  of  the  birth  of  Marie  Antoi- 
nette a  great  earthquake  convulsed  a  large  part  of  the 
world  ;  this  earthquake,  which  ruined  Lisbon,  and  im- 
pressed so  differently  Voltaire  and  Goethe,  seemed  to 
certain  superstitious  courtiers  an  omen  of  significance 
concerning  the  young  princess.  The  education  of  the 
royal  children  was  careful  and  domestic.  Francis  I. 
and  Maria  Theresa  were  much  attached,  were  devoted 
to  their  family.  Hunter  Francis  died  in  the  August 
of  1765,  when  the  little  Marie  Antoinette  was  barely 
ten  years  old,  and  the  increasing  cares  of  the  state  in- 
terrupted the  close  intercourse  between  the  mother  and 
daughter.  Her  son  Joseph,  who  was  born  in  1741,  was 
formally  crowned  Emperor  of  Germany,  but  the  power 
remained  in  the  hands  of  Maria  Theresa,  and  to  better 
wield  that  power  Maria  Theresa  was  obliged  to  leave 
the  education  of  Marie  Antoinette  to  other  hands  than 
her  own.  Royal  princes  and  princesses  are  always  said 
by  the  chroniclers  of  their  childish  days  to  have  been 
prodigies  of  learning  and  of  virtue  ;  but  it  is  not  difficult 
in  piercing  through  the  courtly  eulogies  of  the  young 
archduchess  to  learn  that  she,  capricious,  self-willed, 
charming,  was  quick  to  learn  whatever  pleased  her,  but 
not  too  eager  or  too  willing  to  apply  herself  to  unattrac- 
tive studies.  An  amiable  Madame  de  Brandis,  a  strong- 
minded  Countess  de  Lercheufeld,  in  turn  guided  the 


108  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  Vil. 

mind  of  Marie  Antoinette  until  the  time  came  when  her 
hand  was  formally  sought  for  a  son  of  France.  Her 
education  then  was  imperfect.  She  spoke  French  fairly 
fluently,  but  wrote  it  very  badly.  Italian  she  had 
learned,  and  learned  well,  from  that  amazing  Abbe  de 
Metastasio,  whose  strange  fortune  it  was  all  through  his 
life  to  be  loved  and  admired  above  his  merits.  She 
danced  exquisitely,  and  she  adored  music.  Music  won 
her  the  adoration  of  the  young  Mozart,  who,  when  he 
was  younger,  yet  dreamed  with  nursery  audacity  of  mak- 
ing a  bride  of  his  royal  playmate ;  music  won  her  the 
adoration  of  Gluck,  the  great  master  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury music.  When  the  time  was  at  last  ripening  for  the 
royal  marriage  which  was  to  ally  the  two  reigning  houses 
of  France  and  Austria,  it  was  decided  by  Choiseul  that 
some  one  should  be  sent  to  instruct  the  future  dauphiness 
in  all  the  knowledge  that  was  necessary  to  make  her 
shine  in  the  court  circles  of  Versailles.  He  found  this 
some  one  in  the  Abbe  de  Vermond,  suggested  to  him  by 
Lomenie  de  Brienne,  archbishop  of  Toulouse.  Over  the 
choice  many  bitter  words  have  been  spoken.  There  are 
writers  who  see  in  the  Abbe  de  Vermond  a  very  cor- 
rupter  of  youth,  the  evil  genius  of  Marie  Antoinette. 
We  may  assume  that  Vermond  was  a  well-meaning 
man  of  a  narrow  knowledge,  able  to  attract  the  mind 
of  the  young  archduchess,  but  wholly  unfitted  for  the 
grave  task  of  guiding  her  safely  through  the  difficulties 
that  were  likely  to  lie  in  her  way.  He  did  not  capti- 
vate Mercy,  the  wise  and  faithful  Mercy,  whose  lengthy 
residence  at  Versailles  and  whose  clear  intelligence  ena- 
bled him  to  appreciate  very  keenly  the  difficulties,  the 
perils  even,  to  which  the  young  dauphiness  was  likely 
to  be  exposed.  Mercy  came  to  Vienna  himself  to  give 
the  finishing  touches  to  the  veneer  of  French  modes 


1770.  AUGUR  GOETHE.  109 

and  French  thoughts  which  Vermond  was  applying  to 
his  charge;  he  dwelt  long,  earnestly,  and  unsuccessfully 
upon  the  absolute  importance  of  appreciating  the  for- 
malities of  etiquette  which  swayed  the  court  of  France. 
Mercy  knew  well  enough  the  difference  between  the 
ways,  the  well-nigh  domestic  ways,  of  the  Austrian 
court  and  the  elaborate,  glittering  ceremonialism  which 
prevailed  in  France.  One  thing  at  least  the  young  arch- 
duchess could  and  did  learn — to  dance.  She  danced  di- 
vinely, winning  the  heart  of  her  dancing-master,  who 
declared  that  she  would  be  his  glory.  Such  as  she 
was,  a  somewhat  spoiled,  ill-educated,  graceful  child  of 
fifteen,  trying  desperately  to  play  at  being  a  French 
princess  at  a  time  when  she  had  better  have  been  play- 
ing in  the  nursery,  she  was  sent  out  into  the  new,  strange 
world  of  Versailles.  When  Maria  Theresa  trembled, 
thinking  of  that  vicious  court,  Kaunitz  reassured  her 
diplomatically.  "  We  must  give  a  lily  to  gain  a  lily," 
he  urged  sententiously,  and  so  the  lily  was  given.  On 
April  19,  1770,  the  Archduke  Leopold  solemnly  wedded 
his  sister,  Marie  Antoinette,  in  the  Augustine  convent 
in  the  name  of  the  Dauphin  of  France,  and  the  young 
dauphiness  set  out  upon  her  memorable  journey  from 
her  old  to  her  new  home. 

Let  the  young  Goethe  speak.  He  was  at  Strasburg 
playing  at  law,  and  learning  card-playing  and  dancing, 
and  winning  the  hearts  of  his  dancing-master's  daughters. 
If  these  and  other  things  disturbed  his  studies,  "yet 
this  dissipation  and  dismemberment  of  my  studies  was 
not  enough,  for  a  remarkable  political  event  set  every- 
thing in  motion,  and  procured  us  a  tolerable  succession 
of  holidays.  Marie  Antoinette,  Archduchess  of  Austria 
and  Queen  of  France,  was  to  pass  through  Strasburg  on 
her  road  to  Paris.  The  solemnities  by  which  the  people 


110  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cii.  VIJ. 

are  made  to  take  notice  that  there  is  greatness  in  the 
world  were  busily  and  abundantly  prepared,  and  es- 
pecially remarkable  to  me  was  the  building  which  stood 
on  an  island  in  the  Rhine  between  the  two  bridges, 
erected  for  her  reception,  and  for  surrendering  her  into 
the  hands  of  her  husband's  ambassadors."  The  em- 
broidered tapestry  with  which  this  pleasure-house  was 
lined  greatly  attracted  the  young  poet,  and  he  paid 
many  a  silver  coin  to  its  porter  for  the  privilege  of  going 
in  and  looking  at  it.  Two  of  the  rooms  had  tapestry 
worked  after  Raphael's  Cartoons,  which  filled  Goethe 
with  indefinable  delight;  the  hangings  of  the  third  and 
chief  saloon  greatly  shocked  and  startled  him.  The  pict- 
ure presented  the  legend  of  Jason  and  his  two  brides, 
the  dark  witch  woman  of  Colchis,  and  the  fair  girl  Creusa 
of  lolchos.  At  the  left  of  the  throne,  poor  Creusa  strug- 
gled with  the  merciless  flames  in  the  midst  of  despairing 
sympathizers;  at  the  right  the  distraught  Jason  beheld 
his  murdered  children;  above,  the  sorceress  drove  in  her 
dragon-car  along  the  clouds.  Small  wonder  if  the  impet- 
uous young  Goethe  called  upon  his  companions  to  wit- 
ness such  a  crime  against  good  taste  and  feeling.  "  Is 
it  permitted,"  he  asked,  "  so  thoughtlessly  to  place  before 
the  eyes  of  a  young  queen,  at  her  first  setting  foot  in 
her  dominions,  the  representation  of  the  most  horrible 
marriage  that  ever  was  consummated  ?  Is  there,  then, 
among  the  French  architects,  decorators,  upholsterers, 
not  a  single  man  who  understands  that  pictures  represent 
something,  that  pictures  work  upon  the  mind  and  feel- 
ings, that  they  make  impressions,  that  they  excite  fore- 
bodings? It  is  just  the  same  as  if  they  had  sent  the 
most  ghastly  spectre  to  meet  this  beauteous  and  pleas- 
ure-loving lady  at  the  very  frontiers."  The  something 
sibyllic  in  these  utterances  of  the  youthful,  indignaut 


1770.  HOW   TO   MAKE  A  ROYAL   PROGRESS.  m 

Goethe  strikes  us  with  all  the  inspiration  of  prophecy, 
but  they  did  not  delight  the  companions  to  whom  they 
were  addressed.  They  hurried  him  away  as  best  they 
could,  assuring  him  soothingly  that  the  people  of  Stras- 
btirg  would  be  too  busy  to  seek  omens  in  the  hangings 
of  a  wall.  Yet  the  young  Goethe  was  right,  and  an 
omen  more  portentous  and  more  menacing  is  not  record- 
ed in  the  annals  of  the  curious. 

A  little  later  Goethe  saw  the  young  queen,  and  his 
description  forms  a  parallel  picture  to  Burke's  immortal 
eloquence  :  "  I  yet  remember  well  the  beauteous  and 
lofty  mien,  as  cheerful  as  it  was  imposing,  of  this  youth- 
ful lady.  Perfectly  visible  to  us  all  in  her  glass  car- 
riage, she  seemed  to  be  jesting  with  her  female  attend- 
ants, in  familiar  conversation,  about  the  throng  that 
poured  forth  to  meet  her  train."  So,  for  the  first  time, 
the  fair  Marie  Antoinette  swims  within  the  ken  of  great 
eyes,  so,  for  the  first  time,  she  appears  before  us,  limned 
in  immortal  language,  with  her  foot  upon  the  threshold 
of  France.  If  she  could  only  have  known  what  the 
greatest  man  of  that  time,  one  of  the  greatest  men  of 
all  time,  was  thinking  of  as  he  gazed  upon  that  fair, 
gracious  advent,  perhaps  the  imperial  Austrian  heart 
might  have  been  touched  to  some  purpose,  and  the  his- 
tory of  France  written  quite  otherwise.  For  there  was 
one  circumstance  in  connection  with  this  day  which 
struck  the  vivid  fancy  of  'Goethe,  and  which  is,  as  it 
were,  the  key  to  all  that  followed.  A  formal  regulation 
had  been  issued  that  no  deformed  persons,  no  cripples, 
nor  disgusting  invalids  should  presume  to  show  them- 
selves upon  the  road  of  the  royal  progress.  It  is  one  of 
the  most  horrible  characteristics  of  the  dying  century 
and  the  dying  monarchy,  this  insane  attempt  to  hide, 
to  suppress,  to  avoid,  and  so  to  forget  the  stern  facts  of 


H2  TIIE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  VII. 

humanity.  Goethe,  though  he  calls  it  a  "  very  rational 
regulation,"  appreciated  the  grim  popular  humor  which 
joked  about  it,  and  he  interpreted  the  humor  in  a  little 
French  poem  which  compared  the  advent  of  Christ,  who 
came  into  the  world  especially  to  seek  the  sick  and  the 
lame,  with  the  coming  of  the  queen  who  scared  the 
unfortunates  away.  Goethe's  friends  seem  to  have  been 
pleased  with  this  little  satire;  a  French  friend,  however, 
fell  foul  mercilessly  of  the  language  and  the  metre,  and 
Goethe  wrote  no  more  French  poems.  But  the  fact 
that  it  was  written,  that  it  could  be  written,  is  the  most 
significant  preface  to  the  story  that  ended  in  the  Con- 
ciergerie  and  on  the  scaffold.  The  ghastly  pretence 
that  a  royal  road  must  be  all  smiles  and  roses  and  fair 
favor,  which  no  touch  of  human  sorrow  and  human  shame 
or  pain  was  to  approach,  could  only  end  in  an  hour  in 
which  squalor  and  suffering  and  despair  should  force 
their  way  into  the  sham  enchanted  palace,  and  trample 
on  the  purple.  The  lesson  is  still  significant. 

The  grim  presages  which  Goethe  drew  from  the  Jason 
pictures  were  soon  responded  to.  In  that  part  of  the 
pavilion  reserved  for  the  Austrian  court,  Marie  Antoi- 
nette had  her  first  experience  of  the  etiquette  of  her  new 
country.  A  Dauphin  of  France,  animated  by  the  same 
principles  which  dictated  the  wedding  conditions  of 
John  Antony  Riqueti  of  Mirabeau,  insisted  that  noth- 
ing should  remain  with  his  royal  consort  of  a  land  which 
was  no  longer  hers.  So  the  young  Austrian  princess 
was  solemnly  undressed,  even  to  her  very  chemise  and 
stockings,  and  reclad  from  head  to  foot  in  the  garments 
provided  for  her  by  France.  Courtly  etiquette  always 
assumes,  and  perhaps  wisely,  that  to  change  in  ap- 
pearance is  to  change  in  fact.  But,  unhappily,  no  chang- 
ing of  chemise  and  stockings  could  make  poor  Marie 


1770.  MARIE   ANTOINETTE'S  ROYAL  ROAD.  H3 

Antoinette  other  than  the  "Austrian,"  in  the  eyes  of  her 
court  enemies  and,  at  last,  in  the  eyes  of  France  at  large. 

By  slow  and  ceremonial  stages  the  young  dauphiness 
proceeded  from  Strasburg  to  Saverne,  from  Saverne  to 
Nancy,  from  Nancy  to  Bar,  from  Bar  to  Chalons,  from 
Chalons  to  Soissons,  from  Soissons  to  Compiegne.  The 
route  was  one  long  triumph — flowers,  balls,  Te  Deiims, 
public  banquets.  It  was  roses,  roses,  all  the  way,  as 
Browning's  luckless  hero  says  in  the  poem.  A  little 
way  beyond  Compiegne,  the  Duke  de  Choiseul  met  the 
dauphiness  and  her  escort  and  guided  her  to  a  space  in 
the  forest  by  the  Berne  Bridge,  where  she  found  a  royal 
party  who  had  travelled  from  Versailles  to  meet  her. 
The  young  Austrian  fell  at  the  king's  feet.  He  lifted 
her  up,  embraced  her  and  presented  her  to  the  dauphin, 
who,  in  his  turn,  in  what,  we  may  imagine,  was  a  some- 
what perfunctory  and  awkward  fashion,  kissed  his  bride. 
At  the  chateau,  the  king  presented  to  the  stranger  a 
number  of  princes  and  peers,  the  Duke  de  Chartres 
among  the  number — an  ominous  presentation.  Here, 
too,  for  the  first  time  she  met  the  Princess  de  Lamballe. 
From  so  far  these  two  fair  young  women  had  met,  and 
for  what  a  parting ! 

More  festivities,  more  journeyings  by  slow  stages, 
more  gifts,  more  banquets,  more  meetings  with  persons 
of  importance,  including  Madame  du  Barry,  who  ob- 
tained the  privilege  of  supping  at  the  dauphiness's  ta- 
ble at  La  Muette.  The  dauphiness  was  simple  enough 
or  skilful  enough  to  find  the  Du  Barry  charming.  The 
Du  Barry  did  not  take  long  to  find  the  young  dauphin- 
ess dangerous  and  to  hate  her  with  all  her  heart.  At 
last,  on  a  stormy  Wednesday,  May  16, 1770,  in  the  chap- 
el at  Versailles,  the  dauphin,  in  the  eyes  of  all  that  was 
noblest  and  fairest  in  France,  placed  the  ring  of  gold 
L— 8 


]14  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VII. 

upon  the  girl's  finger,  gave  her  the  thirteen  traditional 
pieces  of  gold.  More  presentations,  chiefly  of  foreign 
ambassadors,  suppers,  music,  blessing  of  the  nuptial  bed 
by  the  Archbishop  of  Rheims;  Marie  Antoinette  of 
Austria  slept  that  night  as  Dauphiness  of  France.  The 
great  ambition  of  Maria  Theresa  was  fulfilled.  No 
dream  slipped  through  the  gates  of  horn  to  stand  by 
mother  or  child  and  warn  them  of  fate.  But  the  su- 
perstitious shuddered  over  the  savage  storm  which  beat 
upon  Versailles  on  the  wedding-day,  and  drew  ominous 
prognostications  from  the  thunder-strokes  that  beat  upon 
the  palace  on  the  day  when  the  dauphiness  first  set  foot 
therein.  A  more  evil  omen  was  yet  to  come:  the  fort- 
night of  successive  festivals  in  honor  of  the  wedding 
ended  on  May  30;  there  was  a  great  display  of  fire- 
works in  the  Place  Louis  XV.;  the  crowd  was  great — 
the  precautions  few — the  police  arrangements  insuffi- 
cient; two  great  waves  of  the  crowd  met  in  a  narrow 
space — the  crush  became  murderous.  When,  at  last,  it 
was  ended  and  the  crowd  dissolved,  the  scene  was  like 
a  field  of  battle;  hundreds  of  the  dead  strewed  the 
ground — poor  luckless  merrymakers  who  came  to  a  fete 
and  found  a  massacre.  It  was  never  decisively  known 
how  many  were  killed  on  that  terrible  night.  On  the 
good  old  courtly  principle  of  sparing  at  all  hazards  the 
feelings  of  the  royal  people,  as  little  as  possible  was 
said  about  it,  and  ruined  families  mourned  their  losses 
in  such  stoical  silence  as  they  could  muster  lest  the 
sound  of  their  sorrow  should  vex  the  ears  of  the  young 
princess.  One  hundred  and  thirty -two  corpses  were 
hurriedly  interred  in  the  cemetery  of  the  Madeleine, 
there  to  wait  awhile  for  more  august  companionship. 
Away  in  far  Frankfort-on-the-Main  the  news  of  the 
catastrophe  caused  aching  hearts  for  a  season  in  the 


1770.  GOETHE'S  FOREBODINGS.  115 

house  with  the  lyre  above  its  portal ;  in  the  house  of 
Dr.  Goethe  the  inmates  trembled  for  the  young  Johann 
Wolfgang,  then  believed  to  be  in  Paris,  whose  silence 
led  them  to  fear  the  worst.  They  were  undeceived — 
the  young  Johann  Wolfgang  had  been  fooling  them. 
Wanting  a  holiday  from  Strasburg  for  some  whim  of 
his  own,  he  had  pretended  to  go  to  Paris,  and  had  even 
written  a  letter  dated  Paris,  which  he  had  got  a  friend 
to  post.  Fate  had  not  ordained  that  the  young  Goethe's 
life  was  to  be  so  untimely  ended.  But  young  Goethe, 
reflecting  on  the  awful  news,  remembered  again  the 
Strasburg  tapestries  with  their  hideous  tale  of  Jason's 
marriage  and  felt  his  odd  melancholy  forebodings  deepen. 


116  THE  i'KEKCH   HE VOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

A    QTJEEB    WORLD. 

IT  was  a  queer  world  upon  which  the  little  Austrian 
archduchess  now  shone  for  the  first  time.  The  beauti- 
ful, imperious,  wilful  girl,  who  was  scarcely  more  than 
a  child,  found  herself  suddenly  in  very  different  sur- 
roundings from  those  that  had  been  familiar  to  her 
girlhood  in  Vienna  and  in  Schonbrunn.  The  old  king 
himself,  the  central  sun  of  the  celestial  court  system, 
was  not  an  over-attractive  figure.  He  was  then  sixty 
years  old,  worn  with  vices,  cynical,  weary,  sensual,  with 
a  taste  for  turning,  a  taste  for  cooking,  and  a  stronger 
taste  for  mistresses,  a  great  devotion  to  the  reigning 
favorite  and  a  great  indifference  to  the  government  of 
the  country.  He  was  as  immoral  as  an  ape ;  he  was 
about  as  useful  to  the  country  he  was  supposed  to  gov- 
ern as  an  elderly  ape  would  have  been,  if  that  creature 
of  the  greenwoods  had  been  taught  to  wear  the  royal 
purple  and  the  trappings  of  the  Saint-Esprit.  But  he 
was  King  of  France,  and  Maria  Theresa  appreciated  the 
fact  thoroughly,  and  her  daughter,  through  her,  appre- 
ciated it  as  thoroughly.  Marie  Antoinette  knew  well 
that  it  was  part  of  her  business  to  captivate  the  old 
king,  and  she  set  to  work  very  steadily  to  win  what- 
ever feelings  of  kindlier  affection  might  be  left  in  his 
wicked,  withered  old  heart.  It  is  scarcely  surprising  to 
find  that  she  succeeded.  With  all  his  baseness,  Louis 
was  still  in  the  curious  courtly  sense  of  the  word  a 


1770.  THE  DU  BARRY.  117 

gentleman,  and  could  hardly  fail  to  be  touched  by  the 
youth,  the  beauty,  and  the  pretty  ways  of  his  gracious 
Austrian  grandchild.  But  there  was  a  figure  at  the 
court  even  more  important  than  the  king's.  We  have 
seen  how  at  La  Muette  the  dauphiness  noted  the  bold, 
beautiful  face  of  Madame  du  Barry  at  her  table,  and 
asked,  perhaps  in  childish  ignorance  and  all  simplicity, 
what  part  Madame  du  Barry  played  in  the  great  pag- 
eant of  the  courtly  life.  We  are  told  that  the  per* 
plexed  and  vague  answer  given  by  the  person  she  asked 
was  to  the  effect  that  Madame  du  Barry's  business  at 
the  court  was  to  amuse  the  king.  "Then  let  her  be- 
ware," is  said  to  have  been  Marie  Antoinette's  jesting 
answer,  "  for  I  warn  her  that  she  will  find  a  serious  ri- 
val in  me." 

Madame  du  Barry  was  hardly  likely  to  welcome  the 
rising  of  the  Austrian  star.  She  was  the  real  sovereign 
of  the  court,  the  real  sovereign  of  France,  the  living 
cynical  proof  of  the  degradation  of  the  monarchy  and 
the  monarch.  The  reign  of  the  Du  Barry  made  decent 
men  regret  the  reign  of  the  Pompadour.  At  least  the 
Pompadour  was  a  woman  of  education,  of  ability,  who, 
if  not  of  gentle  blood,  bore  herself  like  a  lady  of  gentle 
blood,  and  was  always  exquisitely  careful  never  to  allow 
her  influence  to  be  ostentatiously  or  offensively  obtruded. 
But  Madame  du  Barry  was  a  very  different  sort  of 
woman  from  Madame  de  Pompadour,  and  her  triumph 
over  the  king  was  the  most  eloquent  possible  proof  of 
the  royal  declension  in  ignominy.  The  De  Goncourts, 
in  their  life  of  Madame  du  Barry,  quote  from  the  "  Jour- 
nal" of  Hardy  preserved  in  the  National  Library  of 
Paris  a  curious  episode  which  forms  a  most  appropriate 
preface  to  a  record  of  a  strange  and  shameful  career. 
A  certain  ecclesiastic  strange  to  Paris  and  its  ways  was 


U8  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

dining  at  a  house  where  after  dinner  a  Parisian  priest 
bade  his  brethren  present  drink  to  "  The  Presentation." 
The  ingenuous  stranger  asked  if  it  was  the  ceremony  of 
the  Presentation  of  our  Lord  to  the  Temple  which  was 
to  take  place  the  next  day,  whereupon  the  priest  who 
had  proposed  the  toast  answered  that  he  was  thinking 
of  the  presentation  of  the  new  Esther  who  was  to  de- 
throne Haman.  The  new  Esther  was  Madame  du  Barry; 
the  new  Haman  was  the  minister  Choiseul. 

In  the  year  1743,  in  the  month  of  August,  the  natural 
child  of  Anne  Bequs  was  born  at  Vaucouleurs,  was  bap- 
tized and  named  Jeanne.  A  protector  and  patron  of 
the  mother,  a  wealthy  financier  named  Dumonceau, 
caused  the  little  girl  to  be  taught  to  read  and  write  and 
began  her  amazing  education  by  placing  her  with  her 
mother  in  the  house  of  his  mistress,  a  Mdlle.  Frederique, 
famous  in  the  courtesanship  of  the  day  for  her  red  hair 
and  her  extreme  looseness  of  morals.  This  excellent  be- 
ginning was  presently  modified  by  Mdlle.  Frederique 
herself,  who  began  to  grow  jealous  of  the  growing 
charms  of  little  Jeanne.  Little  Jeanne  was  packed  off 
to  the  Convent  of  Saint -Aure,  a  gloomy  institution 
where  poor  girls  were  kept  respectable  under  a  regimen 
of  appalling  austerity.  Little  Jeanne  revolted  against 
the  regimen,  was  sent  back  to  Mdlle.  Frederique,  who 
would  have  none  of  her,  and  who  succeeded  in  inducing 
Dunaonceau  to  turn  Jeanne  and  her  mother  into  the 
streets.  Jeanne  was  then  fifteen.  She  drifted  about 
the  streets  for  a  while  hawking  cheap  jewellery  and 
plying  a  sordid  prostitution.  Then  a  mysterious  uncle, 
a  Father  Picpus,  turned  up  and  got  her  a  place  as  com- 
panion at  Cour-Neuve,  in  the  environs  of  Paris,  where 
old  Madame  Lagarde  cheered  her  declining  years  with 
theatrical  entertainments.  But  Madame  Lagarde  had 


1743.  THE   HARLOT'S  PROGRESS.  119 

sons  who  could  appreciate  the  beauty  of  Jeanne,  and 
Jeanne  was  soon  sent  about  her  business. 

Then  she  got  a  place  in  a  modiste's  shop  and  began 
the  life  of  little  gallantry  which  led  her  from  lover  to 
lover  into  the  arms  of  the  rascally  Count  du  Barry,  and 
opened  the  way  to  the  higher  gallantry  which  was  to 
niche  her  for  a  season  on  the  steps  of  a  throne.  Count 
du  Barry  was  a  swaggering,  profligate  rogue,  who 
claimed  descent  from  the  English  Barrymores,  and  who 
sustained  in  Paris  a  kind  of  commerce  of  beautiful 
women  whom  it  was  his  business  and  profit  to  discover, 
and  train  for  the  benefit  of  wealthy  patrons.  Every 
man  has  an  ideal,  even  a  man  in  so  despicable  a  business 
as  this  of  Count  du  Barry's.  Du  Barry's  ambition  was 
to  be  the  purveyor  of  a  mistress  to  the  king  himself. 
He  had  already  tried  and  failed  when  he  found  in 
Jeanne,  the  adventuress  whom  he  had  formed  into  an 
accomplished  and  brilliant  courtesan,  the  woman  he 
wanted.  Louis  XV.  saw  Jeanne,  how  and  when  histo- 
rians differ,  and  was  completely  conquered,  to  the  great 
grief  of  Lebel,  his  valet,  who  seems  to  have  died  of 
something  like  grief  at  discovering  that  what  he  had 
regarded  as  a  passing  fancy  was  likely  to  prove  a  per- 
manence in  the  royal  affections.  But  as  Madame  du 
Barry  was  neither  noble  nor  wedded,  it  was  decided  by 
the  king  that  she  must  be  the  one  and  the  other.  Count 
du  Barry  could  not  marry  her  himself,  as  he  had  already 
a  wife  living.  But  there  was  his  brother,  Guillaume, 
needy  officer  of  marines  at  Toulouse — the  very  man  ! 
A  sort  of  sham  husband  being  thus  found,  a  sort  of 
sham  father  was  found  in  a  certain  almoner  of  the  king, 
Gomard  de  Vaubernier,  who  consented  to  regard  him- 
self as  the  parent  of  the  fair  Jeanne,  and  so  spare 
Guillaume  du  Barry  the  pain  of  wedding  and  King 


120  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

Louis  the  pain  of  loving  a  young  lady  who  was  only  a 
natural  child  !  The  ludicrous  farce  was  played  out  and 
the  new  Madame  du  Barry  found  herself  comfortably 
quartered  at  Versailles  as  the  mistress-in-chief  of  the 
king. 

From  that  moment  the  name  of  Madame  du  Barry 
was  carried  by  the  winds  of  rumor  to  all  the  corners  of 
the  earth.  Quite  unconsciously  she  played  a  mighty 
part  in  the  great  game  of  politics.  Every  one  who  hated 
Choiseul,  all  the  discontented  courtiers,  all  the  allies  of 
the  Jesuits  against  whom  he  had  waged  so  merciless  a 
war,  found  in  the  new  favoiite  a  weapon  to  their  hand. 
Choiseul  had  laughed  at  favorites  before;  had  he  not 
overthrown  Madame  d'Esparbes  simply  by  taking  her 
by  the  chin  in  public  and  asking  her,  "  Well,  little  one, 
how  are  your  affairs  getting  on  ?"  But  the  Du  Barry 
was  a  more  serious  foe.  She  had  an  able  prompter  al- 
ways in  the  background  in  rascally,  clever  Count  John ; 
she  had  a  watchful  adviser  and  confidante  always  by 
her  in  rascally,  clever  Count  John's  rascally,  clever, 
slightly  humpbacked  sister,  the  famous  Chon.  The 
world  that  began  to  talk  of  Madame  du  Barry  began  to 
recognize  in  her  a  rival  and  a  serious  rival  to  Choiseul, 
and  around  her  flowing  petticoats  gathered  all  the  op- 
ponents of  the  powerful  minister.  Madame  du  Barry, 
in  her  dainty  nest  at  Versailles,  with  her  black  page 
and  her  parrot,  and  her  ape  and  her  poodle,  and  her 
dainty,  flowing  simplicity  of  attire,  her  unpowdered  hair 
and  unpainted  face,  her  lisping  voice  that  always  blun- 
dered s  into  z,  was  preparing  the  way  for  the  fall  of  the 
great  Choiseul. 

Madame  du  Barry  had  a  certain  rough-and-ready  way 
of  revenging  herself  upon  those  who  were  unlucky 
enough  to  offend  her.  There  is  one  story  told  in  this 


1768-70.  WHIPPING  A  COUNTESS.  121 

connection  which  is  curiously  characteristic  of  the  wom- 
an and  her  ways,  and  her  innate  vulgarity.  Her  friend 
the  Countess  de  Rosen  in  a  rash  moment  quarrelled 
with  the  favorite,  and  sought  in  more  ways  than  one  to 
cause  her  annoyance.  The  favorite  complained  to  the 
king.  Louis  shrugged  his  shoulders.  "  Madame  de 
Rosen  is  only  a  schoolgirl,  and  shoiild  be  treated  like  a 
schoolgirl."  Madame  du  Barry  took  the  royal  sugges- 
tion perfectly  seriously.  She  invited  Madame  de  Rosen 
to  come  and  see  her.  Madame  de  Rosen  came.  Once 
inside  the  Du  Barry's  rooms,  she  was  seized  upon  by  a 
sufficiency  of  stout  serving-girls,  and  in  the  Du  Barry's 
laughing  presence  was  soundly  birched  in  the  most 
schoolgirl  fashion.  Poor  Madame  de  Rosen,  hurt  and 
hysterical,  complained  to  the  king.  Louis,  who  had  for- 
gotten his  suggestion,  mildly  reproved  the  favorite,  who 
immediately  reminded  the  monarch  that  she  was  only 
obe)nng  his  own  advice.  The  king  laughed,  and  suc- 
ceeded in  pacifying  Madame  de  Rosen,  who  afterwards 
became  very  good  friends  again  with  her  chastiser. 

In  spite  of  the  Du  Barry,  however,  and  all  her  wiles, 
the  most  important  figure  in  the  court  still  was  the  fig- 
ure— in  the  eyes  of  young  Louis,  the  sinister  figure — of 
the  Duke  de  Choiseul.  At  this  time  he  was  just  fifty- 
one  years  of  age,  and,  though  he  knew  it  not,  his  great 
career  lay  already  behind  him.  Behind  him  lay  all 
those  great  achievements,  all  those  greater  plans,  his 
military  youth,  the  envoyship  to  Rome,  secret  treaties 
with  Maria  Theresa,  long  alliance  with  the  Pompadour, 
mad  schemes  for  invasion  of  England,  blunderings  in 
America,  blunderings  in  the  West  Indies,  blunderings 
in  India,  blunderings  in  Poland,  "Family  Compact" 
triumph  and  failure,  anti- Jesuit  failure  and  triumph. 
So  many  showy  successes,  so  many  scarcely  less  showy 


122  TiJE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

failures,  were  crowded  into  that  restless,  busy,  brilliant 
half-century  of  life. 

One  very  fateful  meeting  led  the  young  dauphiness  to 
a  very  fateful  friendship.  Perhaps  no  figure  in  all  the 
courtly  world  is  more  attractive,  more  perplexing,  than 
that  of  Marie  Therese  Louise  de  Savoie-Carignan,  Prin- 
cesse  de  Lamballe,  whose  beautiful  face  looks  out  upon 
us  and  upon  all  time  with  such  an  air  of  exquisite  can- 
dor in  Hickel's  portrait  as  engraved  by  Fleischraann. 
That  fair,  unfortunate  creature,  whose  marriage  was  so 
desperately  miserable  and  pitiable,  who  came  so  near  to 
marrying  Louis  XV.  in  his  old  age,  has  had  many  assail- 
ants, chief  among  them  the  acridly  unvirtuous  Madame 
de  Genlis,  and  many  impassioned  champions,  of  whom 
M.  de  Lescure  and  M.  Georges  Berlin  are  the  latest  and 
the  most  impassioned.  Perhaps  Carlyle  rather  over- 
shoots his  mark  when  he  says  of  Madame  de  Lamballe 
that  "  she  was  beautiful,  she  was  good,  she  had  known 
no  happiness."  The  beautiful  friend  of  Marie  Antoi- 
nette must  have  known  some  happy  hours  in  that  bright 
court  which  danced  so  daintily  over  the  volcanic  earth, 
in  spite  of  her  ghastly  marriage,  in  spite  of  all  that  was 
to  be.  Even  Madame  de  Genlis,  who  declares  that  her 
hands  were  "terribly  ugly," has  little  to  say  against  her 
nature  ;  even  the  profligate  and  pitiful  Lauzun  has  to 
admit  that  she  was  "  as  good  as  she  was  pretty." 

Madame  de  Lamballe's  beauty  still  seems  to  live  far 
acroes  the  generations.  Hickel's  portrait,  with  its  air 
of  childish  grace,  can  thrill  us  across  the  wilderness 
of  years  with  its  delicate,  haunting  loveliness.  That 
hair  of  fair  Italian  gold  which  has  been  likened  to 
the  tresses  which  crown,  nimbus -like,  the  heads  of 
Raphael's  Madonnas,  those  sweetly  smiling  lips,  those 
frank,  kindly,  loyal  eyes  can  still  captivate,  can  still  in- 


1749-92.  LADIES   OF  THE   COURT.  123 

spire.  "She  is  a  model  of  all  the  virtues,"  said  the 
Baroness  d'Oberkirch  ;  and  the  praise  does  not  seem  to 
have  been  exaggerated.  If  it  was  her  misfortune  to 
be  married  to  the  unlucky  Lamballe,  it  was  her  good- 
fortune  to  have  in  her  father-in-law,  the  Duke  de  Pen- 
thievre,  the  brightest  and  best  example  of  the  old  no- 
bility of  France.  The  recently  published  memoirs  of 
Dom  Courdemanche,  edited  by  Etienne  Allaire,  add  one 
more  to  the  many  delightful  pictures  we  possess  of  the 
good  old  peer.  If  France  could  have  boasted  more 
nobles  like  the  Duke  de  Penthievre  and  less  like  the 
Duke  de  Lauzun  towards  the  close  of  the  last  century, 
the  story  of  the  French  Revolution  might  have  been 
very  different. 

There  were  certain  other  ladies  at  that  court,  ladies 
very  unlike  the  Du  Barry  on  the  one  hand,  or  Madame 
de  Lamballe  on  the  other,  three  soured  and  faded  ladies 
who  had  the  misfortune  to  be  the  daughters  of  the 
king.  They  were  known  to  the  court,  they  are  known 
to  the  world,  by  the  endearing  nicknames  bestowed  upon 
them  by  their  royal  father,  Loque,  Coche,  Graille — 
nicknames  that  Carlyle  allots  inaccurately.  These  were 
Madame  Adelaide,  Madame  Victoire,  and  Madame  So- 
phie. Another  sister,  Madame  Louise,  known  to  the 
paternal  slang  as  Chiffe,  had  left  the  court  for  the  se- 
clusion of  a  convent  before  the  arrival  of  Marie  Antoi- 
nette. The  three  were  all  old  maids,  and  very  old- 
maidish  old  maids,  much  given  to  piety,  to  scandal,  and 
the  like.  Two  of  them  were  exceedingly  plain — Ma- 
dame Adelaide  and  Madame  Sophie — which  did  not  serve 
to  increase  the  little  affection  that  lingered  in  the  heart 
of  Louis.  Poor  desolate  ladies,  they  seemed  very  insig- 
nificant all  through  their  lives,  and  yet  two  of  them  had 
their  mischievous  importance,  and  did  more  harm  than 


]24  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

a  legion  of  old  maids  could  set  right  again.  M.  Edouard 
de  Barthelemy  has  devoted  a  biggish  book  entirely  to 
Mesdames  de  France,  in  which  the  curious  will  find  a 
vast  amount  of  interesting  particulars  concerning  these 
old  ladies  and  tneir  varying  fortunes.  M.  de  Barthe- 
lemy has  worked  hard  with  all  the  available  material. 
The  neglected,  melancholy  old  ladies  live  again  in  his 
pages,  curious  shadows  flitting  across  that  sinful  court, 
curious  shadows  flitting  before  the  terrors  of  the  new 
order  of  things  which  knocked  a  less  sinful  court  into 
fragments. 

With  their  early  lives  we  have  nothing  to  do  ;  their 
interest  only  begins  for  us  with  the  advent  of  Marie 
Antoinette.  Madame  Victoire,  the  sad  sister  who  had 
once  been  something  of  a  beauty,  played  but  a  small  part 
in  the  grim  game  that  ended  for  her  in  exile  and  Trieste. 
Madame  Adelaide  and  Madame  Sophie  were  more  im- 
portant. It  was  permitted  to  them  to  have  a  share, 
and  no  inconsiderable  share,  in  accelerating  the  progress 
of  the  inevitable  Revolution.  They  seem  to  have  hated 
Marie  Antoinette  almost  from  the  first.  Ill-favored 
themselves,  they  resented  the  beauty  of  the  new  dau- 
phiness.  Slighted  by  their  father,  they  resented  the 
attentions  which  Louis  XV.  offered  to  Marie  Antoi- 
nette and  the  admiration  with  which  he  spoke  of  her. 
Formal,  precise,  old-fashioned,  and  austere,  they  were 
shocked  and  scandalized  by  the  lightness  of  Marie  An- 
toinette's nature.  Their  rigid  respect  for  etiquette  and 
strict  decorum  was  daily,  hourly  outraged  by  the  free- 
and-easy  fashions  which  Marie  Antoinette  brought  with 
her  from  the  virtuous  but  free-and-easy  court  of  Vi- 
enna. Marie  Antoinette  was  not  to  be  long  in  France 
without  calling  into  existence  an  anti-Dauphiness  party, 
in  which  party  the  two  Mesdames  Adelaide  and  Sophie 


1732-53.  A  WATCHMAKER'S  SON.  125 

were  leaders.  The  anti-Dauphiness  party  was  yet  to 
grow  into  an  anti-Queen  party,  fostering  all  the  acrid, 
malignant,  envenomed  support  that  Madame  Adelaide 
and  Madame  Sophie  could  lend  to  it.  Let  us  take  note 
as  we  pass  on  that  Mesdames  de  France  have  been  the 
precious  patronesses  of  an  obscure  watchmaker  who 
desires  many  things,  especially  riches  and  fame.  We 
shall  meet  with  him  again.  His  name  is  Beaumar- 
chais. 

If  Cervantes  smiled  Spain's  chivalry  away,  so  certainly 
Beaumarchais  helped  to  smile  away  the  old  nobility  of 
France.  In  late  January  of  1732  a  reputable  Parisian 
watchmaker  named  Caron  begot  a  son,  whom  he  named 
Pierre  Augustin,  and  brought  up  in  the  good  old  Egyp- 
tian way  to  his  own  trade.  The  young  Caron  had  a 
soul  above  clock-cobbling.  He  was  smart,  good-look- 
ing, ambitious,  esurient  of  success  and  the  things  suc- 
cess brings  with  it — popular  applause,  pretty  women, 
the  favor  of  the  great,  money  in  poke,  fine  clothes,  and 
all  the  fun  of  the  world's  fair.  But  he  owed  his  first 
rise  in  life  to  his  watches.  He  invented  a  new  escape- 
ment ;  some  rogue  pirated  ;  Caron,  who  was  always 
pugnacious  and  litigious,  rushed  into  print  to  claim  his 
own,  and  the  Academy  of  Sciences,  to  which  the  watch 
feud  was  referred,  decided  in  his  favor.  This  brought 
him  into  court  notice  :  he  was  graciously  permitted  to 
try  his  skill  upon  Madame  de  Pompadour's  watch,  gra- 
ciously permitted  to  call  himself  Watchmaker  to  the 
King.  Once  in  touch  of  the  court,  Caron  resolved  to 
keep  so.  Luck  favored  him.  A  well-to-do  woman  fell 
in  love  with  the  handsome,  pushing  young  watchmaker; 
the  woman  was  married  ;  she  cajoled  her  husband,  Con- 
troller Francquet,  into  making  over  his  post  to  Caron. 
When  Francquet  died  his  widow  straightway  married 


126  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

Caron,  who  henceforth  assumed  the  title  of  De  Beau- 
marcbais,  which  he  was  yet  to  make  famous.  Later 
on,  the  judicious  purchase  of  a  secretaryship  to  the 
king  flattered  his  vanity  by  bringing  with  it  a  title  of 
nobility. 

The  daughters  of  the  king,  Loque,  Coche,  Graille, 
and  Chiffe,  took  him  up,  patronized  him,  allowed  him  to 
teach  them  the  harp,  and  gave  him  a  recognized  place 
in  the  society  of  the  court.  Not  that  the  court  al- 
ways liked  him  ;  but  the  cool  impudence  of  Beaumar- 
chais  enabled  him  always  to  meet,  and  meet  success- 
fully, the  insolence  of  any  contemptuous  courtier.  The 
story  is  well  known  of  the  young  nobleman  who  on  one 
occasion  asked  Beaumarchais  to  look  at  his,  the  young 
nobleman's,  watch,  as  he  feared  there  was  something 
wrong  with  it.  Beaumarchais  calmly  observed  that  he 
was  so  long  out  of  practice  that  he  feared  he  would  be 
scarcely  equal  to  the  task  ;  then,  taking  the  watch  from 
the  courtier's  hand,  he  let  it  fall  from  his  own  carefully 
careless  fingers  to  the  floor,  where  it  dashed  to  pieces. 
With  a  grave  smile  Beaumarchais  said,  "  You  see,  I  am 
out  of  practice,"  and  so  walked  leisurely  away,  leaving 
the  courtier  gazing  sufficiently  ruefully  at  his  shattered 
treasure. 

If  Beaumarchais  was  never  afraid  of  making  ene- 
mies, he  had  the  art  also  of  making  serviceable  friends. 
Paris-Duverney,  the  great  banker,  was  one  of  these  ; 
Puris-Duveruey,  who  helped  Beaumarchais  to  make  his 
fortune.  After  Paris-Duverney's  death  a  document  was 
found  in  which  the  banker  acknowledged  himself  Beau- 
marchais's  debtor  for  16,000  francs.  The  Count  la 
Blache,  who  hated  Beaumarchais,  contested  the  validity 
of  the  document,  and  thereupon  arose  one  of  the  most 
fiercely  fought  lawsuits,  or  rather  succession  of  law- 


1732-76.  BEADMARCIIAIS.  127 

suits,  whereof  the  world  holds  witness.  Beaumarchais 
gained,  lost  on  appeal,  got  into  trouble  through  an  at- 
tempt to  gain  by  a  money  payment  to  Goezman's  wife 
the  favorable  vote  of  Goezman  the  Parliamentarian 
on  whose  report  the  vote  of  the  Parliament  depended. 
Goezman  brought  bis  action  against  Beaumarchais  for 
attempted  corruption  of  a  judge.  Beaumarchais  de- 
fended himself  in  the  most  brilliant,  the  bitterest  m&- 
moires,  and,  though  he  lost  his  case  for  the  time,  his 
attacks  upon  the  detested  Parliament  made  him  as  pop- 
ular with  the  people  as  he  had  been  unpopular.  In  the 
common  phrase,  Beaumarchais  was  bad  to  beat.  His 
defeat  by  Goezman  cost  him  his  civil  rights,  as  his  de- 
feat by  La  Blache  had  cost  him  his  little  fortune  ;  but 
in  his  indefatigable  way  he  declined  to  be  defeated,  and 
in  the  end  not  only  got  his  civil  rights  restored  to  him, 
but  actually  defeated  La  Blache  himself. 

Beaumarchais  had  a  kind  of  genius  for  getting  into 
queer  affairs.  It  is  not  over-agreeable  to  find  a  man  of 
genius  drifting  about  Europe  in  the  hunt  after  pam- 
phlets lampooning  Madame  du  Barry,  even  with  the 
purpose  of  buying  them  up  and  destroying  them  for 
the  king ;  still  less  so  if  he  could  believe,  as  has  been 
hinted,  that  the  pamphlets  in  question  only  existed  in 
Beaumarchais's  ingenious  mind.  The  enthusiasm  with 
which  he  flung  himself  into  the  cause  of  American  inde- 
pendence was  an  enthusiasm  of  that  kind  which  knows 
how  to  make  a  good  thing  out  of  its  sympathies.  But 
we  can  forget  and  forgive  all  the  shifts  and  dodges,  all 
the  seamy  side  of  Beaumarchais's  life,  when  we  come 
to  his  two  immortal  plays.  Commerce  and  the  Clavijo 
affair  had  taken  him  to  Spain  in  his  younger  days,  in 
1764,  and  from  Spain  he  drew  the  inspiration  and  the  at- 
mosphere of  exquisite  intrigue  of  his  two  great  comedies. 


128  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  VIII. 

Those  comedies  ;  those  comedies  !  They  made  Beau- 
marchais  immortal.  They  set  him  up  by  the  side  of 
Moliere.  They  helped  to  laugh  the  Old  Order  out  of 
existence.  Caron  had  always  a  certain  fierce  eagerness 
for  dramatic  success  ;  had  written  and  produced  in  his 
salad  days  two  plays,  which  had  been  uncompromis- 
ingly condemned.  Uncompromisingly  condemned  the 
"  Barber  of  Seville  "  was  very  near  being  too.  Beau- 
marchais  had  his  head  full  of  his  law  affair,  though  all 
Paris  had  its  head  full  of  it  also,  and  crowded  his  text 
with  the  most  tedious  allusions  to  his  litigation.  The 
result  was  a  dead,  dismal  failure  on  the  first  night.  But 
if  Beauraarchais  loved  his  law,  he  loved  his  play  more. 
With  a  ruthless  hand  he  carved  out  all  the  tedious  per- 
sonal stuff,  wrote  and  rewrote,  and  on  the  second  night 
the  play  was  a  great  success.  But  there  was  a  greater 
success  to  come.  It  was  the  "  Mariage  de  Figaro,"  which 
was  destined  to  be  the  "  Don  Quixote  "  of  the  Old  Order. 
Louis  XVI.,  with  some  glimmerings  of  intelligence  sud- 
denly aroused  in  him,  saw  what  the  piece  meant — saw 
even  dimly  what  it  might  mean,  and  refused  his  sanc- 
tion to  its  performance.  The  "  Barber  of  Seville  "  saw 
the  footlights  in  1775  ;  it  was  not  till  1784  that  the 
"Marriage  of  Figaro"  was  brought  out,  and  aroused 
the  laughter  which  helped  to  upset  the  Bastille,  and 
with  it  the  monarchy  five  years  later.  The  success  was 
astonishing,  well-nigh  unprecedented.  Aristophanes 
deriding  democracy  to  an  Athenian  audience  did  not 
win  half  the  enthusiasm  that  came  to  Beaumarchais 
when,  masked  as  Figaro,  he  laughed  at  everything 
which  a  Parisian  audience  was  supposed  to  regard  as 
sacrosanct.  It  is  fatally  easy  to  overrate  the  influence 
of  a  particular  book,  a  particular  speech,  a  particular 
play  upon  a  popular  movement.  But  if  ever  a  move- 


1721-89.  LOUIS   XV.  AND   LOUIS   XVI.  129 

ment  was  helped  to  its  triumph  by  the  two  hours'  traffic 
of  the  stage,  the  French  Revolution  was  helped  by  the 
bitter  buffoonery  of  Gil  Bias  Beaumarchais  in  the  "  Ma- 
riage  de  Figaro." 

It  was  not  given  to  Louis  XV.  to  escape  the  lot  com- 
mon to  all  those  princes  and  monarchs  for  whom  Fran- 
9ois  Villon  inquires  in  his  famous  ballades.  There  came 
an  end  to  his  caperings,  to  his  neat  cynical  sayings,  to 
his  merry-makings  with  his  mistresses  —  Pompadour 
yesterday  and  Du  Barry  to-day  —  to  Pare  aux  Cerfs 
pleasures,  if  Pare  aux  Cerfs  ever  existed,  which  is  by 
no  means  certain  ;  to  all  the  infamies  and  fooleries  which 
make  his  name  a  byword  and  his  reign  a  sham.  The 
years  during  which  he  reigned  were  fertile  of  good  to 
France ;  they  produced  great  thinkers,  great  teachers, 
Encyclopaedists,  economists,  wits,  statesmen  ;  but,  as  far 
as  Louis  XV.  was  concerned,  he  did  nothing  to  make 
his  reign  other  than  a  plague  spot.  "  After  me  the  del- 
uge," indeed.  The  waters  were  rising,  rising  all  through 
the  weak,  worthless,  wicked  reign  ;  now  small-pox  has 
seized  upon  the  sin-weakened  body.  Louis  XV.  lies  as 
dead  and  despicable  as  a  poisoned  rat ;  his  last  maitresse 
en  titre  has  vanished  into  obscurity,  to  emerge  again, 
unhappily,  later  on,  under  terrible  conditions.  Louis 
XVI.  is  King  of  France,  and  the  history  of  the  French 
Revolution  may  be  said  to  seriously  begin.  There  are 
a  new  king  and  queen  on  the  throne  of  France ;  they 
are  both  young ;  they  are  «aid  to  have  prayed  Heaven 
to  guide  them  in  the  difficulties  of  their  new  life.  Never 
were  such  prayers  more  needed,  could  they  but  have 
known  it.  Poor  king,  poor  queen  :  let  us  look  at  them 
a  little  closely  and  try  to  understand  them,  children 
about  to  be  visited  by  the  punishment  for  the  sins  of 
their  fathers. 
L— 9 


13o  THE   FRENCH   KEVOLUTIOX.  CH.  VIII. 

For  fifteen  years  Louis  XVI.  and  Marie  Antoinette 
reigned  over  France  with  no  thought  of  the  fate  that 
was  in  store  for  them.  There  had  been  kings  of  France 
for  hundreds  of  years  past ;  there  seemed  no  reason  to 
doubt  that  there  would  be  kings  of  France  for  hundreds 
of  years  to  come.  These  fifteen  years  were  full  and 
eventful  years.  Certain  events  especially  stand  out, 
events  of  very  different  kinds,  but  all  tending  in  their 
effect  to  the  same  result.  The  comedies  of  Beaumar- 
chais,  the  American  Revolution,  the  Diamond  Neck- 
lace, and  the  Assembly  of  Notables  are  the  cardinal 
points  by  which  to  steer  through  the  stormy  course  of 
that  fifteen  years.  A  queer,  perplexing  fifteen  years 
they  were,  with  their  light-hearted  Trianonism,  their 
desperate  financial  flounderings,  their  Turgots  and  Nec- 
kers  and  Calonnes  and  Lomenie  Briennes,  each  trying 
after  his  own  wise  or  wild  way  to  accomplish  the  impos- 
sible. Fifteen  years  for  the  king  of  much  hunting  and 
lock-making  ;  fifteen  years  for  the  queen  of  Trianon 
light  life,  of  growing  disfavor,  unpopularity,  enmities ; 
fifteen  years  for  the  people  of  growing  discontent,  in- 
creasing poverty  and  pain ;  fifteen  years  of  freer  speech, 
of  conflicting  ambitions,  of  fervid  dreams,  of  desperate 
hopes.  The  momentum  of  the  monarchy  on  its  roll 
down  hill  to  destruction  has  increased  beyond  the  power 
of  man's  hand  to  hold,  increased  probably  beyond  the 
power  of  any  man's  hand  to  retard. 

A  sufficiently  eventful  fifteen  years  they  were.  Poor, 
scheming,  malignant,  strenuous  d'Aguillon  was  puffed 
out  of  favor  by  the  same  breath  that  blew  the  Du  Barry 
down  the  wind  into  seclusion.  Septuagenarian  De  Mau- 
repas  found  the  old  Pompadour  disfavor  which  had 
kept  him  in  the  cold  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  no  longer 
a  barrier ;  he  was  called  to  the  post  of  principal  minis- 


1774-89.  DE   MAUREPAS.  131 

ter,  and  was  thenceforward  to  play  a  pretty  active  part 
for  his  time  of  life  in  helping  to  ruin  France.  He  was 
not  a  very  estimable  old  man,  he  was  not  a  very  intelli- 
gent old  man  ;  he  had  been  in  his  queer  way  a  large- 
handed  patron  of  learnings  he  could  not  well  appreciate; 
he  had  helped  to  send  Maupertuis  to  Lapland,  that  Mau- 
pertuis  whose  wild  ideas  Voltaire  made  so  merry  over ; 
he  had  helped  to  send  Jussieu  to  South  America,  that 
Jussieu  who  was  not  the  most  eminent  of  the  "  Botan- 
ical Dynasty."  He  was  to  play  his  part  now  in  helping 
on  the  French  Revolution. 


132  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IX. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

MARIE     ANTOINETTE. 

MARIE  ANTOINETTE  is  one  of  the  most  perplexing, 
fascinating,  tragic  figures  in  history.  Her  empire  and 
her  influence,  like  the  influence  and  empire  of  Mary 
Stuart,  have  not  ceased  with  her  existence,  but  extend- 
ed almost  unaltered  and  unimpaired  to  the  present  day. 
The  admiration  which  Montaigne,  which  Bran  tome, 
which  Konsard  express  for  Mary  Stuart  is  rivalled  in 
its  warmth  by  the  language  of  her  adherents  to-day ; 
the  praise  of  Burke,  of  Goethe,  of  Mirabeau,  and  of 
Arthur  Young  finds  echo  in  the  passionate  homage 
which  is  still  paid  to  the  name  of  Marie  Antoinette. 
Historians  fight  over  her  as  fiercely  as  the  factions 
wrangled  in  the  days  of  the  Diamond  Necklace,  in  the 
days  of  the  Versailles  Banquet,  in  the  days  of  the  Con- 
ciergerie.  Though  she  belongs,  as  it  were,  to  the  day 
before  yesterday,  though  the  very  traditions  of  her  time 
still  linger  in  certain  ancient  stately  Parisian  circles, 
though  many  live  and  look  upon  the  earth  whose  grand- 
sires  and  grandams  were  familiar  with  the  court  of 
which  she  was  the  most  unhappy  head,  it  is  most  diffi- 
cult to  form  anything  like  a  precise  judgment  upon  her 
character,  her  nature,  and  her  acts. 

Two  schools  of  what  can  hardly  be  called  criticism 
chiefly  assert  themselves.  To  the  one  school  Marie 
Antoinette  is  only  an  uncanonized  saint  and  martyr, 
noblest,  purest,  highest  of  women,  more  than  human  in 


1774-89.  CONTRASTING  PICTURES.  133 

her  beauty  and  her  goodness — a  kind  of  angel  whose 
very  virtues  left  her  the  more  easily  the  prey  to  the 
enmities  of  an  evil  world  The  disciples  of  the  other 
school  hold  her  up  to  all  execration  as  a  mere  she  fiend. 
They  paint  her  proud,  revengeful,  ambitious,  with  more 
offences  at  her  back  than  they  have  thoughts  to  put  them 
in.  They  endow  her  with  monstrous  vices  stolen  from 
the  stews  of  imperial  Rome;  they  accuse  her  of  name- 
less, shameless  sins  ;  they  conjure  up  an  image  of  a  de- 
pravity utter  and  complete,  sickening  even  to  think 
upon,  and  they  assure  us  that  such  is  her  true  likeness. 
They  load  her  life  with  innumerable  love  affairs ;  they 
treat  her  as  the  furious  creature  of  illimitable  and  abom- 
inable passions  ;  they  see  in  her  nearest  and  most  natural 
friendships  the  degradation  of  Baudelaire's  "  Femmes 
Damnees;"  they  drink  in  with  a  greedy  ear  and  a  base 
credulity  the  loathsome  charges  of  the  tribunal  which 
condemned  her.  Her  wanton  blood,  her  unnatural  appe- 
tites, her  tiger's  heart  wrapped  in  a  woman's  hide,  they 
make  responsible  for  all  the  miseries  of  France,  and  they 
exult  over  the  day  of  her  death  as  over  the  day  which 
liberated  a  groaning  world  from  some  monster.  Accu- 
sations which  we  might  hesitate  to  believe  of  Messalina, 
cruelty  which  would  seem  exaggerated  if  attributed  to 
Nero,  they  accept  and  repeat  and  circulate  as  the  cur- 
rent coin  of  history.  The  obscenities  of  revolutionary 
caricature,  the  depravities  of  De  Sade,  the  corrupt  im- 
aginings of  a  corrupt  age,  all  these  are  to  them  as  rev- 
elation, and  they  fish  in  the  literature  of  the  cesspool 
for  every  possible  and  impossible  horror  wherewith  to 
smirch  her  name.  Only  the  imaginings  of  a  madhouse 
could  compete  with  some  of  the  pictures  of  Marie  An- 
toinette presented  to  us  as  serious  history. 
It  may  be  simply  and  safely  assumed  that  neither  of 


134  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  IX. 

these  pictures  is  the  real  woman  or  at  all  like  the  real 
woman.  Probably  no  woman  since  the  world  began 
was  quite  so  angelic  as  the  devotees  of  the  Old  Order, 
the  historians  of  the  Faubourg  Saint-Germain,  would 
have  us  believe  Marie  Antoinette  was.  No  woman,  it 
is  to  be  hoped  for  the  sake  of  humanity,  was  ever  quite 
so  bad  as  the  kind  of  female  Satan  which  the  ragings 
of  a  blood-red  school  of  writers  offer  as  the  true  Marie 
Antoinette.  The  courtly  idolatry  of  the  one  is  more 
pleasant,  more  chivalrous  reading  than  the  other;  but 
the  gutter  ravings  and  the  rhapsodies  are  equally  for- 
eign to  the  serious  seeker  after  truth.  He  would  be 
but  a  sorry  student  of  human  nature  who  gauged  the 
civilization  of  mankind  only  by  the  preciosity  of  a  Eu- 
phuist  or  the  foul  word  scrawled  on  a  wall.  The  rapt- 
ures for  and  the  ragings  against  Marie  Antoinette  are 
of  as  little  service  in  aiding  us  to  obtain  any  true  appre- 
ciation of  her  character  and  of  her  reign.  It  must  be 
admitted,  moreover,  that  more  impartial  historians  are 
sometimes  scarcely  more  satisfactory.  Every  one  who 
has  studied  the  history  of  the  Revolution  knows  the 
sketch  which  Mr.  John  Morley  gives  of  Marie  Antoi- 
nette in  his  essay  on  Robespierre.  Its  frigid  judicial 
ferocity  is  scarcely  more  serviceable  than  the  eulogies 
and  the  lampoons.  Mr.  Morley  criticises  the  child  queen 
of  the  corruptest  court  and  the  corruptest  capital  in 
Europe  as  he  might  criticise  a  Girton  girl  crammed  with 
Comtism  and  the  newest  theory  of  historical  evolution 
placed  in  the  same  exalted  position. 

In  endeavoring  to  understand  Marie  Antoinette  it  is 
impossible  not  to  feel  a  profound  regret  that  the  collec- 
tion of  letters  attributed  to  her  by  the  Count  Paul  Vogt 
d'Hunolstein  should  be  of  no  avail.  Unfortunately,  to 
put  the  case  mildly,  their  authenticity  seems  more  than 


1774-89.  THE  HUNOLSTEIX  LETTERS.  135 

dubious.  It  would  be  as  reasonable  to  base  a  case  in 
favor  of  Marie  Antoinette  upon  an  elaborate  study  of 
Dumas's  "  Chevalier  de  Maisonrouge  "  as  upon  the  let- 
ters of  the  D'Hunolstein  collection.  The  one  is  fiction 
pure  and  simple,  the  other  is  fiction  of  a  graver  kind 
masquerading  in  the  guise  of  history.  Who  that  has 
read  these  letters  would  not  like  to  be  able  to  make 
use  of  them?  For  it  may  be  admitted  that  they  are 
exceedingly  attractive,  exceedingly  ingeniously  linked 
together.  They  have  all  that  charm  of  fiction  which  is 
sometimes  the  property  of  veritable  fact,  but  they  seem 
to  have  no  value  save  their  charm.  The  curious  in  lit- 
erary puzzles  may  add  these  letters  to  the  letters  of 
Phalaris,  to  the  pseudo-Petronius,  to  the  book  of  Dio- 
nysius  the  Areopagite,  and  the  like.  The  student  of 
history  will  read  them,  if  he  reads  them  at  all,  with  a 
sigh  as  he  follows  the  unfolding  picture  of  this  imagi- 
nary Marie  Antoinette.  In  the  first  letter  she  daintily 
addresses  the  future  husband  as  "  Monsieur  le  Dauphin 
et  Cher  Frere."  She  confides  fears  to  her  mother  of 
her  inexperience  "  in  that  new  country  which  has  adopt- 
ed me  in  your  name."  She  describes  herself  as  "La 
Jeune  Frar^oise."  She  makes  quaint  allusions  to  Rob- 
inson Crusoe  and  to  Lilliput.  She  jests  about  "  la  Dau- 
phine  en  Biscuit  de  Pate  Tendre."  She  depicts  her  new 
life  as  a  perpetual  performance  where  one  has  never  the 
time  to  hear  one's  self  live.  She  makes  affectionate  al- 
lusions to  Metastasio.  She  pictures  the  Count  d'Artois 
as  "  flippant  as  a  page  and  heedless  of  grammar."  She 
gives  accounts  of  her  "petits  bals."  She  requests  her 
sister  to  assure  Maria  Theresa  that  she  has  become  "  as 
French  as  she  told  me  it  was  my  duty  to  become." 
She  makes  solemn  announcement  of  the  little  lady's 
wisdom  teeth.  She  is  enthusiastic  about  Gluck's  "  Iph- 


136  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IX. 

igenia."  She  hits  at  D'Aguillon  as  the  "  Ame  Damnee 
de  la  Comtesse  du  Barry."  She  is  alarmed  at  her  new 
royalty:  "Mon  Dien,  moy  Reine  si  jeune,  j'en  suis  tout 
effrayee."  She  is  surprised  to  find  "  the  determination 
of  certain  folk  to  picture  me  as  a  stranger,  always  pre- 
occupied with  her  own  country  and  only  French  against 
the  grain."  She  is  annoyed  at  the  report  that  she  had 
rebaptized  her  Petit  Trianon  "  mon  petit  Vienne."  She 
is  grieved  at  her  childishness:  "Je  suis  dans  la  main 

O 

de  Dieu  et  je  m'etourdis  le  plus  que  je  peux;  j'en  ai 
besoin,  car  ce  n'est  pas  etre  reine  de  France  que  de  ne 
pas  avoir  les  honneurs  d'un  Dauphin."  She  declares, 
"I  feel  myself  French  to  the  finger-tips,"  "jusqu'aux 
ongles."  She  feels  mingled  joy  and  disappointment- 
over  the  birth  of  "  la  pauvre  petite  "  instead  of  the  ex- 
pected dauphin.  She  naturally  thinks  "  the  cruel  custom 
of  filling  the  bedroom  of  the  queen  at  such  a  moment 
should  be  abolished."  She  has  the  pretty  conviction 
that  her  daughter  is  "  la  plus  belle  enfant  du  royaume." 
She  gossips  about  the  Freemasons,  and  the  reception  of 
the  Princess  de  Lamballe  as  grand  mistress  of  a  lodge. 
She  is  indignant  at  the  audacity  of  the  Cardinal  de  Ro- 
han in  making  love  to  her :  "  You  know  my  aversion 
for  him."  She  is  in  despair  at  the  progress  of  the  "  af- 
f reuse  affaire," the  "abominable  affaire," as  she  calls  the 
case  of  the  Diamond  Necklace.  She  blends  maternal 
solicitude  for  the  cold  of  "  mon  gros  Normandie  "  with 
allusions  to  "ce  charlatan  de  Cagliostro"  and  to  Dame 
la  Motte — "  Je  n'ai  jamais  vu  cette  femme  de  Lamotte." 
She  is  angered  at  the  light  punishment  inflicted  upon 
Rohan,  who  dared  "  to  lend  himself  to  that  mad  and 
infamous  scene  of  the  bosquet,  and  to  believe  that  he 
had  an  appointment  with  the  Queen  of  France.  She  is 
scornful  of  the  clumsy  forgeries  which  were  absurdly 


0.  THE  PIT?  OF  IT.  137 

signed  "Marie  Antoinette  de  France."  She  is  alarmed 
at  the  assembling  of  the  Notables.  The  gloom  of  the 
letters  grows  as  events  succeed  swiftly.  We  witness 
the  conversion  of  the  graceful  queen  and  mother  into 
an  eager  politician,  fighting  for  her  throne,  and  even  for 
her  life,  and  the  lives  of  those  dear  to  her.  We  have 
allusions  to  Lafayette,  to  Orleans,  to  Mirabeau;  despair- 
ing appeals  for  help  to  the  emperor.  We  have  a  sig- 
nificant commentary  on  the  changed  state  of  public 
feeling:  "A  la  mort  de  nion  pauvre  cher  Dauphin,  la 
nation  n'a  pas  seulement  eu  i'air  de  s'en  apercevoir." 
We  have  the  touching  request  to  the  Count  de  Mercy 
to  keep  the  letter  she  writes  to  him,  as  she  would  be 
"bien  aise  de  la  ravoir  un  jour;"  the  earnest  request  to 
the  Princess  de  Larnballe  not  to  come  back  to  danger; 
the  melancholy  plaint  towards  the  end:  "  Je  souffre  nuit 
et  jour,  je  change  a  vue  d'oeil ;  mes  beaux  jours  sont 
passes,  et  sans  mes  pauvres  enfants,  je  voudrais  etre  en 
paix  dans  ma  tombe.  Us  me  tueront,  ma  chere  Chris- 
tine. Apres  ma  mort,  defendez-moi  de  tout  votre  coeur." 
How  gladly  would  we  accept  all  these  as  genuine,  not 
so  much  for  any  fresh  light  they  afford,  but  for  the  ad- 
ditional touches  they  give  to  a  great  historical  picture  ! 
Yet  the  Hunolstein  letters  deserve  some  recognition. 
The  very  fact  that  such  documents  do  exist  is,  in  itself, 
portion  and  parcel  of  the  history;  and  if  they  are  not 
genuine,  their  unknown  constructor  deserves  at  least 
the  credit  of  a  skilful  and  well-ordered  composition. 
There  is,  at  least  in  the  excerpts  here  strung  together, 
nothing  that  Marie  Antoinette  might  not  have  written, 
much  that  she  must  have  said  and  written  in  such  words 
or  words  akin  to  them.  Even  if  it  were  absolutely  cer- 
tain that  the  Hunolstein  collection  were  not  genuine, 
the  letters  would  still  not  be  absolutely  valueless  to  the 


!38  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  IX. 

student,  not  merely  of  the  life  of  Marie  Antoinette,  but 
of  the  strange  cult  of  Marie  Antoinette  that  has  been 
steadily  growing  since  her  death.  A  brilliant  historical 
novel  may  sometimes  afford  a  side-light  to  the  student 
of  history,  and  in  at  least  a  kindred  sense  something 
may  be  gleaned  from  an  acquaintance  with  the  Hunol- 
stein  collection. 

It  is  hardly  fair  to  say,  as  has  been  said,  that  Marie 
Antoinette  was  only  an  Austrian  spy  in  a  high  position. 
She  was  far  too  self-willed,  too  human,  too  intensely 
feminine  to  have  any  real  capability  for  the  part  of 
conscious  or  unconscious  spy.  It  is  the  old  mistake  of 
regarding  all  the  actors  in  the  French  Revolution  as 
being  incarnations  of  logical  purposes.  They  were  all, 
first  and  foremost,  men  and  women,  like  other  men  and 
women — puppets,  even  as  ourselves.  Never  since  the 
world  began  was  any  woman  more  characteristically 
womanly  than  Marie  Antoinette.  Her  womanhood  is 
as  characteristic  as  her  beauty.  The  beauty  of  Marie 
Antoinette  shines  like  a  star  through  all  that  age.  Eng- 
lish Burke,  English  Arthur  Young  shall  pay  their  trib- 
ute of  enthusiasm;  chroniclers  have  left  descriptions 
of  her  at  all  ages.  Bachaumont  makes  her  live  for  us 
as  she  was  when  she  arrived  in  France,  a  dauphiness  of 
scarce  fifteen,  with  the  slight,  unfinished,  girlish  figure, 
her  fair  hair  that  promises  to  become  light  chestnut, 
her  fine  forehead,  her  oval,  almost  too  oval,  face,  her 
eyebrows  "  as  thick  as  a  blonde's  can  ever  be,"  her  blue 
eyes,  her  aquiline  nose,  her  small  mouth  and  full  lips, 
the  lower  the  famous  Austrian  lip,  her  astonishingly 
white  skin  and  natural  beauty  of  complexion  which 
might  well  neglect  the  use  of  rouge.  Nine  years  later 
Madame  Vigee  le  Brun,  whose  portraits  of  the  queen 
are  among  the  most  precious  legacies  of  the  eighteenth 


1774-89.  THE  MOST  FAIR  PRINCESS.  139 

century,  painted  her  portrait  also  in  words,  telling  of 
the  well-developed  form,  the  noble  arms,  the  little  hands, 
the  charming  feet,  and  the  brilliant,  matchless  complex- 
ion of  the  sovereign  she  adored.  A  Tilly  and  a  Segur 
vie  in  their  praises.  If  in  Madame  Campan's  raptures 
over  "all  that  enchanting  being"  we  fear  to  find  the 
rhapsodies  of  the  waiting- women,  we  can  remember 
Burke  and  Arthur  Young  and  feel  reassured.  It  is  dif- 
ficult in  reading  all  these  impassioned  praises  to  think 
of  a  certain  sketch,  which  a  certain  painter  named  Da- 
vid, now  a  young  man,  shall  yet  make — a  sketch  of  a 
haggard,  prematurely  old,  almost  witch-like  figure  of  a 
woman  with  a  cap  of  liberty  on  her  head,  going  to  her 
dismal  death.  But  that  sketch  is  yet  unmade,  those 
fingers  are  only  training  for  it  in  Paris  and  Rome,  with 
little  thought  in  their  owner's  mind  of  what  they  yet 
shall  trace.  Let  us  not  draw  that  curtain. 

It  is  harder  to  judge  of  the  character  of  the  queen 
than  of  her  appearance.  Perhaps  some  words  of  De 
Tilly's  may  help.  "  A  like  or  a  dislike,"  he  says,  "  was 
disclosed  in  her  regard  more  curiously  than  I  have  ever 
seen  elsewhere."  Impetuous,  frivolous,  self-willed,  affec- 
tionate, imperious,  obstinate,  she  was  very  femininely  at 
the  mercy  of  feminine  moods.  A  little  less  capacity 
for  uncompromising  dislike  might  have  saved  the  mon- 
archy for  a  while  through  Mirabeau;  a  little  less  im- 
perious self -consciousness  of  royal  state  might  have 
saved  at  least  the  monarchs  at  the  Varennes  flight. 
But  this  is  of  the  future;  we  shall  be  able  to  judge  bet- 
ter of  the  queen's  character  as  we  trace  her  tragic  story 
step  by  step. 

Those  who  love  the  intimacies  of  great  names,  the 
domestic  minutiae  of  great  dramas,  the  little  familiar 
details  which  bring  home  past  times  and  the  lords  and 


14o  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  IX. 

ladies  of  old  time  so  much  more  vividly  than  the  most 
pompous  panegyric  or  the  most  chiselled  slander,  will 
feel  grateful  to  the  Count  de  Reiset  for  his  two  rare, 
curious,  sumptuous,  and  instructive  volumes,  "  Modes  et 
Usages  au  Temps  de  Marie  Antoinette."  Count  de 
Reiset  republishes  an  account-book  of  a  certain  court 
dressmaker,  in  which  the  dresses  of  the  queen  and  many 
court-ladies  for  several  years  are  recorded.  This  odd 
document  Count  de  Reiset  has  raised  almost  to  the  dig- 
nity of  a  state  paper  by  the  magnificent  series  of  illus- 
trations with  which  he  has  embellished  it  and  by  his 
valuable  and  exhaustive  annotations  and  elucidations. 
The  Count  de  Reiset  adores  his  queen,  and  the  book  is 
so  far  one-sided  and  prejudiced;  but  there  is  no  book 
in  existence  which  gives  a  better  idea  of  what  the  Old 
Order  was  like  in  France,  in  its  habit  as  it  lived,  just 
before  the  Revolution.  Luckily  indeed  for  those  who 
love  the  revolutionary  period,  there  is  no  lack  of  pre- 
cious documents.  The  engravings  of  the  time  stand,  of 
course,  in  the  first  place.  Then,  more  readily  accessible, 
come  the  many  and  magnificent  publications  of  more 
recent  years;  the  precious  and  minute  series  of  illustra- 
tions which  the  Count  de  Viel-Castel  devoted  to  the 
Revolution  and  Empire;  the  set  of  contemporary  revo- 
lutionary costume  plates  from  1790  to  1793  which  has 
been  edited  by  M.  Jules  Claretie  from  the  collection  of 
M.Victorien  Sardou;  the  sumptuous  illustrated  editions 
of  the  De  Goncourts'  books,  which  cover  the  whole  pe- 
riod from  the  Pompadour  to  the  Terror;  the  labors  of 
the  Bibliophile  Jacob.  These  are  the  most  important 
among  many  important  works  which  help  the  curious 
student  of  the  time  to  see  its  men  and  women,  its  he- 
roes and  its  martyrs,  its  saints  and  sinners,  in  their  habit 
as  they  lived. 


1774-89.  THE  NEW   KING'S  GARDEN.  141 


CHAPTER  X. 

TRIANON. 

THERE  are  certain  words  which  have  the  power  to 
move  all  hearers  with  a  profound  degree  of  emotion, 
and  to  call  up  very  vivid  pictures  in  the  minds  of  the 
imaginative.  Perhaps  of  all  such  spell-words,  no  one 
is  better  to  conjure  with  than  the  word  "  Trianon." 
For  the  sight  or  the  hearing  of  that  word  at  once  sets 
fancy  working;  the  mental  stage  is  at  once  cleared  for 
the  daintiest,  most  pathetic  set  scene  imaginable.  That 
fairy  palace,  those  gracious  gardens,  the  chosen  toy,  the 
dearest  trinket  of  the  most  beautiful  and  the  most  ill- 
starred  of  queens,  arises  more  or  less  vaguely,  like  the 
shadow-palace  of  a  dream,  before  the  mental  vision  of 
the  historically  sentimental.  A  little  world  of  rococo 
decorations,  of  clipped  avenues,  of  loveliness  all  ranged 
and  patched  and  powdered,  of  noble  gentlemen,  a  little 
dissolute  but  very  devoted,  of  piquant  abbes  and  des- 
perately wicked  cardinals  and  brave  Besenvals,  and 
criminal  queen-resembling  adventuresses,  and  the  cen- 
tre of  all  this  the  enchanting  queen  herself — such  is  the 
phantasmagoric  image  which  the  word  Trianon  calls  up 
to  the  large  proportion  of  persons  to  whom  history  is 
always  half  romance.  Trianon  itself  was  actually  the 
fruit  of  a  queer  whim  for  domesticity  which  at  one  pe- 
riod seized  upon  that  weariest  of  weary  kings,  Louis 
XV.  Madame  de  Pompadour,  ever  at  her  wit's  end  to 
keep  the  monarch  amused,  hit  upon  the  device  of  pleas- 


142  THE  FRENCH  RE  VOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

ing  her  royal  lover  with  bourgeois  pleasures  and  the 
pursuits  of  little  folk.  Louis  had  always,  even  as  a 
little  child,  loved  Trianon;  he  loved  it  more  than  ever 
when  the  fancy  of  Madame  de  Pompadour  converted  it 
into  a  kind  of  model  farm,  all  pigeons,  and  cows,  and 
chickens,  and  kitchen-garden.  Here  the  king  and  his 
mistress,  with  a  picked  court  of  gentlemen  and  pretty 
women,  played  a  kind  of  ghostly  pastoral;  here  Louis 
posed  grotesquely  enough  as  a  sort  of  demi-god  gentle- 
man farmer,  an  eighteenth  -  century  Admetus.  It  is 
given  to  no  one  now  to  behold  the  entire  Trianon  of 
Louis  XV.  Time  has  buffeted  it  as  mercilessly  as  it 
has  buffeted  Antioch,  and  much  of  it  has  vanished  ir- 
remediably from  the  face  of  creation.  But  "though 
much  is  taken,  much  remains ;"  the  curious  can  still 
please  their  eyes  with  the  dainty  pavilion,  with  its  fan- 
ciful farmyard  decorations  of  cocks  and  hens,  and  its 
central  absurdity  of  the  eagle,  supposed  to  be  allegorical 
of  the  august  Jovism  of  Louis  XV. 

At  first  the  title  "  Little  Trianon"  was  not  used.  The 
new  pleasure-place  was  called  by  many  names,  but  not 
that  name.  "  New  Menagerie  of  Trianon,"  "  Garden  of 
the  Menagerie,"  "New  King's  Garden" — even  "Her- 
mitage " — were  among  its  titles.  It  was  not,  according 
to  M.  Gustave  Desjardins,  until  1759  that  the  term 
"Little  Trianon"  was  habitually  used.  Louis  XV. 
might  very  well  have  called  it  the  garden  of  experiments. 
He  had  an  inclination  for  botany,  which  he  gratified  at 
Trianon  by  attempting  the  acclimatization  of  all  manner 
of  exotics.  In  this  he  was  aided  by  the  most  wonderful 
gardener  of  the  age,  Claude  Richard,  son  of  an  Irishman, 
and  as  devoted  to  horticulture  as  ever  Palissy  was  to 
pottery.  Claude  Richard,  who  took  his  orders  only  from 
the  royal  mouth,  who  took  his  wages  only  from  the  royal 


1774-89.  A   ROYAL   GIFT.  143 

hand,  became  the  joy  of  Louis's  heart.  Under  him  the 
gardens  throve  and  extended  ;  under  him  the  straw- 
berries, which  the  king  loved  best  of  all  fruits,  flourished; 
and  through  him  it  came  to  pass  that  Bernard,  de  Jussieu 
set  up  his  staff  at  Trianon,  and  made  the  botanic  garden 
there  the  admiration  of  all  Europe. 

With  the  advent  of  Madame  du  Barry  came  the  ex- 
ecution of  the  chateau  which  had  been  planned  for  and 
by  Madame  de  Pompadour  ;  the  chateau,  with  all  its 
wealth  of  gracious  pagan  pictures,  with  its  wonder- 
ful Lariot  flying-tables,  which  enabled  a  king  and  his 
company  to  feast  in  discreet  isolation — flying-tables  at 
whose  mechanism  a  certain  locksmith  named  Gamain 
labored.  A  chapel  too — for  was  not  Louis  the  "most 
Christian  King"? — lifted  its  bell- tower  and  Mansard 
roof  among  the  trees.  It  was  at  Trianon,  within  sound 
of  this  chapel  bell,  within  sight  of  this  pretty  paganism, 
that  Louis  XV.  was  struck  by  the  sudden  illness  that 
was  to  prove  mortal.  Scandal  was  flagrantly  busy  as 
to  the  cause  of  the  malady.  Enough  the  fact  that  on 
the  Tuesday,  April  26,  1774,  the  king  came  to  Little 
Trianon,  that  on  the  following  day  he  complained  of  ill- 
ness, that  he  was  removed  to  Versailles,  and  died  there 
on  May  10,  1774.  When  the  history  of  Louis  the  Well- 
beloved  had  come  to  its  grisly  end,  the  history  of  Little 
Trianon  was  just  about  to  begin. 

Louis  XV.  was  not  long  dead  when  Louis  XVI.  made 
a  formal  present  of  Little  Trianon  to  Marie  Antoinette. 
Courtly  chroniclers  of  the  event  put  into  Louis's  mouth 
varying  extravagant  phrases  of  the  petit-maitre  type 
which  we  may  well  believe  he  did  not  utter.  The  gift, 
with  or  without  phrases,  was  exceedingly  welcome  to 
Marie  Antoinette.  She  accepted  it,  but  accepted  it  on 
one  odd  condition.  The  condition  was  that  the  king,  her 


144  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

husband,  was  never  to  come  to  Little  Trianon  except  upon 
her  express  invitation.  Little  Trianon  was  to  be  her  own, 
her  very  own,  as  the  children  say,  and  no  one,  not  even 
her  husband,  was  to  set  foot  therein  save  with  her  gra- 
cious permission.  Louis  might  be  King  of  France  ;  she 
was  determined  to  be  queen  in  her  little  dominion.  Louis 
accepted  the  terms,  and  Little  Trianon  became  Marie  An- 
toinette's kingdom  in  little.  The  condition  was  perhaps 
not  a  very  unnatural  one  for  a  frivolous  young  queen  to 
make.  She  was  anxious  above  all  things  to  be  amused ; 
she  wished  to  make  Little  Trianon  a  very  palace  of 
amusement,  and  Louis,  as  an  inevitable  figure,  was  cer- 
tainly not  likely  to  be  amusing. 

The  queen,  it  would  seem,  had  no  notion  of  allowing 
Little  Trianon  to  remain  a  place  for  learned  experiments. 
In  the  insipid  allegory  of  the  hour,  Minerva  was  to  give 
place  to  Venus  and  the  Graces.  Poor  Bernard  de  Jus- 
sieu's  Botanical  Garden,  which  had  been  the  joy  of  the 
wise,  was  hardly  entreated.  The  queen  wanted  to  have 
a  garden  in  that  manner  which  has  been  called  the 
English  manner,  which  has  been  called  the  Chinese 
manner,  and  which  sought  to  substitute  for  Dutch 
formality  French  frigidity  and  a  tepid  and  tedious 
sham  classicism  ;  the  picturesque  freedom  of  an  English 
park  or  a  Chinese  pleasure-ground.  Nature,  as  cham- 
pioned by  Horace  Walpole  and  Rousseau,  was  to  triumph 
over  trim  alleys  of  quincunxes  ended  by  the  walls 
painted  with  landscapes  which  delighted  last-century 
France  as  much  as  it  had  delighted  Pliny  and  Pompeii. 
So  Bernard  de  Jussieu's  Botanical  Garden  was  abolished 

-"  culbutee,"  Mercier  says— turned  upside  down,  and 
its  treasures  were  rescued  from  destruction  by  pious 
hands,  and  carted  off  to  not  inglorious  exile  in  the  Jardin 
des  Plantes. 


1774-89.  "LITTLE   VIENNA."  145 

Luckless  queen  !  Trianon  was  destined  to  prove  fatal 
to  her  fortunes.  In  almost  every  point  where  its  history 
and  hers  coincide,  it  was  destined  to  be  of  evil  influence 
upon  her.  Through  her  love  for  the  place  arose  the 
rumor — the  unfounded  rumor — that  she  had  baptized  it 
anew  as  the  "petit  Vienne,"  or  the  "petit  Schonbrunn," 
in  order  to  recall  to  her  mind  the  beloved  homes  of  her 
girlhood.  Nothing  could  be  better  qualified  to  make 
the  queen  of  evil  repute  to  sensitive  French  patriotism 
than  the  impression  that  her  heart  and  her  sympathies 
were  still  all  Austrian.  The  term  "  Little  Vienna  "  was 
certainly  in  the  air  for  a  while,  even  if  the  queen  did 
not  herself  directly  sanction  it,  for  it  even  figures,  accord- 
ing to  M.  Desjardins,  in  financial  accounts  for  the  year 
1776.  But  if.  the  imprudence  of  Marie  Antoinette  had 
been  confined  merely  to  giving  rise  to  an  unfortunate 
nickname  for  her  pleasure-place,  there  would  not  have 
been  much  harm  done.  Unfortunately  thus  bad  begins, 
but  worse  remains  behind.  Marie  Antoinette's  mania 
for  an  Anglo-Chinese  garden  was  the  opening  note  in 
the  long  gamut  of  reckless  extravagance  through  which 
she  ran  during  the  early  Trianon  days.  She  was  soon 
at  odds  with  Turgot  on  the  question  of  expense,  and 
it  is  hard  to  say  how  much  of  Turgot's  fall  was  due  to 
his  judicious  hostility  to  the  absurd  and  costly  Anglo- 
Chinese  plaything. 

The  indifference,  the  frivolity,  of  Marie  Antoinette 
would  seem  recklessly  culpable  if  we  did  not  duly  recol- 
lect extenuating  circumstances.  The  air  of  personal 
authority  she  cast  over  Trianon  was  of  itself  calculated 
to  irritate  the  irritable  public  opinion  of  Parisian  society. 
At  Trianon  only  the  red-and-silver  liveries  of  the  queen 
were  to  be  seen  ;  the  red,  white,  and  blue  of  the  king's 
servants  were  nowhere  visible.  At  Trianon  too,  as  after- 
I,— 10 


146  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

wards,  and  yet  more  unwisely  at  St.  Cloud,  Marie  Antoi- 
nette issued  orders  and  notices  signed  "  de  par  la  Reine  " 
— "  by  the  Queen's  command  " — instead  of  the  habitual 
and  authoritative  "  de  par  le  Roi."  An  act  of  this  kind 
in  a  country  where  the  Salic  law  was  so  scrupulously 
observed  and  so  jealously  regarded  was  light-hearted  to 
a  culpable  degree.  No  less  foolish  was  her  petulant,  if 
very  natural,  dislike  to  the  restrictions  of  courtly  custom 
and  convention  which  led  her  to  practically  banish  from 
her  little  court  the  solemn  and  formal  Madame  de 
Noailles,  whom  the  queen  nicknamed  "  Madame  1'Eti- 
quette,"  whom  the  palace-ladies  called  "Madame  Ho- 
nesta,"  and  to  establish  in  her  stead  the  Princess  de 
Chimay.  Nor  did  the  queen  do  much  to  win  the  good 
opinion  of  the  world  at  large,  and  the  circle  of  friends 
in  whom  she  most  delighted,  by  the  way  in  which  she 
allowed  herself  to  be  seen  rushing  from  pleasure  to  pleas- 
ure, unaccompanied  by  the  king,  and  escorted  only  by  a 
young,  heedless  company,  among  whom  the  king's  broth- 
ers, D'Artois  and  Monsieur,  made  themselves  needlessly 
conspicuous.  In  those  early  Trianon  years,  Marie  An- 
toinette seemed  to  think  that  the  life  of  a  great  queen 
had  no  other,  no  higher  duties  than  gambling,  dancing, 
extravagant  dressing,  festals  of  all  kinds,  and  high-flown, 
too  gallant  friendships,  which  at  the  best  were  dangerous 
flirtations,  and  which  scandal,  ever  eying  for  the  worst, 
persisted  in  regarding  as  culpable  intrigues.  Maria  The- 
resa, Mercy,  Joseph  IT.,  regarded  Marie  Antoinette's 
recklessness  with  the  gravest  alarm.  Joseph  visited  his 
sister  in  the  May  of  1777,  and  no  doubt  reasoned  and 
reasoned  in  vain  with  the  sister  to  whom  he  was  so  de- 
voted that  it  was  with  the  utmost  reluctance  that  he 
left  Trianon  to  return  to  his  empire.  Mercy  declared 
that  the  only  object  of  the  young  queen's  life  was  pleas- 


1779.  THE   QUEEN'S  ATTENDANTS.  147 

ure.  Maria  Theresa  wrote  in  1775  that  her  daughter 
was  rushing  to  her  ruin,  and  would  be  fortunate  if  she 
succeeded  in  preserving  the  virtues  of  her  rank. 

The  maddest  of  all  the  mad  deeds  of  her  Trianon  reign 
was  done  when,  in  1779,  she  fell  ill  of  the  measles.  Here, 
for  the  first  time,  she  took  up  her  abode  at  Trianon.  It 
was  judged  best  that  she  should  separate  herself  from 
the  king  during  the  course  of  the  malady,  lest  Louis, 
who  had  never  had  the  measles,  should,  by  taking  it,  be 
prevented  from  attending  to  affairs  of  state.  The  queen, 
accordingly,  left  Versailles  and  settled  down  at  Trianon. 
What  happened  then  would  seem  well-nigh  impossible 
to  believe  if  we  did  not  have  it  on  the  grave  and  reluc- 
tant testimony  of  Mercy.  It  is  certain  that,  when  the 
queen  went  to  Trianon,  she  chose  for  the  attendants  on  her 
sick-chamber  not,  as  might  be  expected,  four  court  ladies, 
but  four  gentlemen,  and  these  four  gentlemen  perhaps 
the  very  last  that,  given  such  astonishing  conditions  at 
all,  the  queen  should  have  chosen.  These  four  strange 
attendants  were  the  Duke  de  Coigny,  the  Duke  de  Guines, 
Count  Esterhazy,  and  Baron  de  Besenval. 

The  Duke  de  Coigny  was  a  soldier,  forty  years  of  age, 
neither  strikingly  good-looking  nor  conspicuously  witty, 
popular  with  most  persons  on  account  of  his  good  man- 
ners and  his  good-nature  ;  disliked  by  Mercy  on  account 
of  the  undue  influence  he  seemed  to  exercise  over  the 
queen  ;  detested  by  Madame  de  Polignac  for  the  same 
reason,  and  for  the  efforts  he  made  to  overthrow  her  in- 
fluence. 

The  Duke  de  Guines  owed  his  duchy  to  the  queen, 
who  manifested  for  him  the  most  violent  partisanship. 
He  chiefly  deserves  recollection  of  an  ignoble  kind  as 
having  been  the  principal  cause  of  Turgot's  overthrow. 
He  had  been  ambassador  in  London,  where  he  had  earned 


148  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

the  epithet  of  "magnificent."  He  had  a  dubious  dis- 
tinction for  coarse  conversation,  accompanied  by  a  per- 
fect gravity  of  countenance.  He  was  fat  with  a  rapidly 
increasing  corpulence,  and  struggled  against  this  by  wear- 
ing garments  so  tight  that  he  had  to  get  on  a  chair  and 
drop  into  them  while  they  were  held  out  to  him  by  his 
servant.  This,  however,  was  only  on  days  when  he  had 
decided  to  martyrize  himself  by  standing  all  day  ;  on 
days  when  he  condescended  to  sit  down  he  wore  attire 
of  sufficiently  loose  construction  to  permit  of  the  process. 
He  was  fond  of  playing  on  the  flute,  and  had  fluted  his 
way  into  the  favor  of  Frederick  the  Great  and  now  of 
Marie  Antoinette. 

Valentin  Esterhazy  was  a  young  Hungarian  gentleman 
and  soldier  high  in  the  favor  of  the  queen,  to  Maria 
Theresa's  annoyance  and  regret.  He  seems  to  have 
been  a  comparatively  harmless,  commonplace,  well-mean- 
ing, feather-headed  young  man,  but  the  queen  delighted 
to  honor  him,  to  correspond  with  him,  to  pay  his  debts. 
His  was  perhaps  the  least  amazing,  where  all  were  amaz- 
ing, of  the  four  presences.  Undoubtedly  the  most  amaz- 
ing, where  all  were  amazing,  was  the  Baron  de  Besenval. 
Swiss  and  soldier  of  nearly  sixty  years  of  age,  white- 
haired,  courtly,  with  a  bitter  wit,  cynical,  cheaply  senti- 
mental, gallant  with  a  kind  of  full-flavored  barrack-room 
gallantry,  a  writer  of  light  tales,  a  singer  of  ranz  des 
vaches,  he  had  gained  a  great  influence  over  the  queen, 
and  was  said  to  employ  it  in  the  perversion  of  her  mind. 
Mercy  found  him  pushing,  foolish,  flippant.  In  1775, 
presuming  on  his  friendship  for  Marie  Antoinette,  he 
went  so  far  as  to  make  her  a  violent  declaration  of  love, 
which  cost  him  for  some  time  her  favor  and  intimacy. 
That  she,  however,  still  regarded  him  as  her  very  close 
friend,  she  showed  now  by  choosing  him  for  one  of  the 
four  astounding  guardians  of  her  sick-chamber. 


1722-79.  BESENVAL.  149 

Pierre  Victor,  Baron  of  Besenval,  is  one  of  the  most 
carious  figures  of  the  age.  His  race  sprang  from  Swiss 
Savoy;  his  name  was  sometimes  spelled  Beuzenwald 
and  sometimes  Besenwald;  and  we  know  on  the  author- 
rity  of  an  inscription  written  in  a  copy  of  his  memoirs 
belonging  to  M.  Octave  Uzanne  that  his  name  was  right- 
ly pronounced  Bessval.  "  A  la  cour  et  dans  1'ancien 
monde,  nous  prononcions  Bessval."  His  mother  was  a 
Polish  Countess  Belinska,  of  kin  with  the  Leszczynski 
house;  his  father  was  the  diplomatist  to  whom, and  not 
to  Goertz  or  Alberoni,  the  honor  of  the  idea  which  pleased 
Charles  XII.  of  dethroning  the  King  of  England  was 
due.  Our  De  Besenval  began  early  in  the  career  of  arms; 
distinguished  himself  for  his  gallantry  as  a  soldier,  dis- 
tinguished himself  for  his  gallantry  as  a  lover.  Born 
in  1722,  he  was  campaigning  with  the  Swiss  Guards 
when  he  was  thirteen  years  old,  and  he  flashes  later  on 
through  the  Seven  Years'  War,  brilliant,  foolhardy,  a 
figure  as  captivating  as  one  of  Duraas's  musketeers.  In 
the  piping  times  of  peace  he  ruffled  it  with  the  wild 
spirits  who  surrounded  the  Duke  of  Orleans.  He  ruffled 
it  most  especially  with 'that  young  German  Count  de 
Frise,  the  fine  flower  of  the  gallantry  of  the  age,  whose 
famous  letter  to  his  friend,  half  prose  and  half  verse 
like  the  old  chantefable  of  Aucassin  and  Nicolete,  is  one 
of  the  daintiest  productions  of  that  age  of  literary  dainti- 
ness. The  nephew  of  the  Marshal  de  Saxe  died  young, 
De  Besenval  lived  on,  growing  more  popular,  more  witty, 
more  audacious  as  time  whitened  his  locks.  Fair,  insolent, 
and  lovable,  the  Prince  de  Ligne  calls  him  in  his  de- 
lightful memoirs,  which  contain  no  more  delightful  pages 
than  those  which  paint  the  portrait  of  Besenval.  De 
Ligne  pictures  him  the  hero  of  a  kind  of  eternal  summer, 
shining  at  sixty  years  of  age  like  a  young  man  on  the 


150  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

threshold  of  his  career,  conspicuous  alike  in  the  brilliant 
circle  of  the  queen's  adorers  and  among  the  intrepid 
hunters  whose  society  pleased  the  king.  He  liked  to  be 
mixed  up  in  many  things;  he  gained  certain  courtly 
privileges  by  winning  certain  patents  of  nobility  "of 
which  he  had  no  need,  having  so  much  nobility  in  his 
soul,"  and,  as  for  the  hunting,  surely  "  a  grizzled  Swiss 
lieutenant-general  who  was  present  at  the  death  of  the 
Duke  of  Berwick  might  very  well  dispense  with  being 
present  at  the  death  of  the  stag  forty  years  later."  But 
that  was  the  character  of  the  man — well-preserved,  eu- 
peptic, enjoying  himself  much  and  in  many  ways,  car- 
rying into  courtly  places  something  of  the  coarse  salt 
humors  of  the  barrack-room  and  the  camp.  A  graceful 
amateur  in  the  arts  of  painting  and  the  arts  of  letters,  a 
lover  of'graceful  gardens,  of  graceful  women,  above  all 
of  one  most  graceful  woman,  he  stands  out  in  vigorous 
relief  from  the  rest  of  the  courtly  rout.  He  could  be 
faithful  to  his  friends,  he  had  early  devoted  himself  to 
De  Choiseul,  and  he  followed  De  Choiseul  in  his  disgrace 
to  Chanteloup;  he  had  in  him  the  makings  of  an  excel- 
lent administrative  soldier,  as  the  reforms  he  effected 
in  his  Swiss  forces  show  ;  that  he  could  write  with  a 
dexterous  grace  his  memoirs  and  the  little  pieces  that 
he  wrote  at  Drevenich.  during  the  campaign  of  1757 
prove.  He  was  a  man  of  too  many  tastes  to  do  anything 
really  great,  but  he  succeeded  at  least  in  being  remark- 
able. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  whole  history  of  the  Old  Order 
more,  strange  than  this  story  of  the  royal  illness.  The 
young  queen  acted  like  the  girl  in  the  Poitau  folk-song, 
who  audaciously  rejoices  in  the  fact  that  she  has  her 
three  lovers  to  wait  upon  her:  one  to  brush  her  clothes, 
and  one  to  dress  her  hair,  and  one  to  make  her  bed.  She 


1749-79.  LA  POLIGNAC.  151 

chose  to  be  attended  in  her  bedchamber  by  four  gentle- 
men, all  alike  renowned  chiefly  for  their  profligacy,  all 
alike  regarded  by  public  scandal  as  the  lovers  of  Marie 
Antoinette,  all  alike  able  to  boast  of  very  special  proofs 
of  her  favor.  Guines  could  say  that  for  him  she  had 
overthrown  Turgot ;  Esterhazy  that  she  had  paid  his 
debts  and  written  him  innumerable  letters  ;  Coigny  that 
he  owed  her  many  honors  ;  Besenval  that  he  had  ad- 
dressed her  in  the  words  of  love  and  still  retained  her 
friendship.  What  can  we  think  of  the  queen  who  was 
nursed  by  these  four  libertines  and  dandies  ;  still  more, 
what  can  we  think  of  the  king  who  knew  of  this  and  yet 
permitted  it?  Fantastic  gallantry  never  aped  more 
madly  since  the  world  began.  The  four  courtiers  actu- 
ally proposed  to  pass  all  the  night  and  every  night  in 
Marie  Antoinette's  bedroom.  This  outrage* at  least 
Mercy  managed  to  prevent.  With  infinite  difficulty  he 
succeeded  in  arranging  that  the  gentlemen  should  leave 
the  queen's  bedside  at  eleven  at  night  and  return  again 
at  seven  in  the  morning. 

If  the  queen's  name  suffered  through  her  men  friends, 
it  suffered  also  through  the  women  she  was  devoted  to. 
Her  friendship  for  Madame  de  Lamballe  might  have 
passed  ;  but  there  was  another  and  even  more  famous 
friend  of  Marie  Antoinette,  the  mention  of  whose  name 
even  now  has  the  power  of  goading  the  opponents  of 
the  queen  to  fury.  Gabrielle-Yolande-Claude-Martine 
de  Polastron,  born  in  1749 — the  same  year  as  the  Prin- 
cess de  Lamballe  —  married  in  1767  the  Count  Jules 
de  Polignac.  She  was  not  wealthy,  neither  was  her 
husband;  she  lived  generally  away  from  the  court,  until 
she  chanced  to  win  the  affections  of  Marie  Antoinette 
and  to  become  one  *f  the  brightest  of  the  fixed  stars 
in  the  Versailles  firmament.  The  name  of  Madame 


152  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  X. 

de  Polignac  is  a  name  to  conjure  up  hatred  with.  The 
animosity  which  assails  the  queen  deepens  in  acridity 
when  it  is  addressed  to  her  dearest  friend.  So  intem- 
perate is  some  of  the  language  that  has  been  used  about 
her  that  it  would  almost  seem  as  if  in  the  eyes  of  certain 
writers  Madame  de  Polignac,  and  Madame  de  Polignac 
alone,  was  responsible  for  all  the  evils  of  the  Old  Order 
and  all  the  sorrows  of  the  Revolution.  On  the  other 
hand,  certain  other  writers  have  made  the  inevitable 
attempt  to  rehabilitate  her  character,  and,  stealing  the 
pigments  of  the  courtly  limners  of  the  queen,  have  paint- 
ed us  a  Duchess  de  Polignac  of  the  most  angelic  type, 
modest,  retiring,  unambitious — a  sort  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury Una.  We  may  very  readily  decline  to  accept  either 
picture.  The  Duchess  de  Polignac,  as  she  afterwards 
became,  was  a  rarely  beautiful  woman,  a  rarely  charming 
woman.  We  can  judge  in  some  degree  of  her  beauty 
still,  from  her  portraits;  her  charm  we  must  take  on 
trust  from  the  unanimous  enthusiasms  of  aLevis,  a  Segur, 
a  Tilly,  a  Besenval,  a  De  la  Marck,  a  Madame  Campan, 
who  all  agree  in  their  tributes  to  the  singular  grace  of 
her  character  and  bearing. 

Her  beauty  and  her  charm  completely  conquered 
Marie  Antoinette.  Her  royal  friendship  for  the  Princess 
de  Lamballe  waned  and  paled  before  the  hot  enthusiasm 
of  her  regard  for  the  beautiful  wife  of  Jules  de  Polignac. 
Madame  de  Polignac  became  one  of  the  most  important 
figures  at  the  court.  Whether  she  was  ambitious  her- 
self or  not,  she  naturally  became  the  knot  of  a  little 
group  of  ambitious  people  who  hoped  to  play  upon  the 
stops  of  Madame  de  Polignac's  popularity,  to  govern 
the  queen  through  the  favorite  and  the  king  through 
the  queen.  Undoubtedly  the  influence  of  Madame  de 
Polignac  was  not  a  fortunate  influence  upon  the  queen. 


1775-79.  THE  POLIG.VAC  PARTY.  153 

However  innocent  Madame  de  Polignac  may  have  been 
of  any  deliberate  schemes,  she  became  the  centre  of  a 
set  of  schemers  ;  she  belonged  by  tradition,  by  interest, 
by  affection,  to  that  worst  kind  of  court  party  which  sees 
the  salvation  of  a  nation  only  in  the  comfort  of  the  court, 
and  considers  those  institutions  only  possible  which  mean 
the  maintenance  of  that  court  in  all  possible  luxury  and 
all  possible  authority.  The  gang  who  thronged  the  Poli- 
gnac salon,  who  clung  around  the  Polignac  skirts,  and 
who  hoped  to  guide  the  course  of  the  queen's  action 
through  the  Polignac  fingers,  were  not  a  gang  who  were 
likely  to  be  good  advisers  for  a  young  and  feather-headed 
queen.  A  Duke  de  Guines,  who  was  to  help  to  overthrow 
Turgot;  a  Duke  de  Coigny,  who  was  to  come  nigh  to  strik- 
ing his  king  ;  a  Prince  de  Ligne,  writer  of  incomparable 
memoirs,  but  saturated  with  the  ideas  of  the  Old  Order ; 
a  Baron  de  Besenval  ;  a  Count  Valentin  Esterhazy  ;  a 
Count  d'Adhemar  ;  a  light  Madame  de  Chalons ;  a 
plain,  pleasing,  ambitious  Diane  de  Polignac,  sister  of 
Jules — such  were  the  members  of  the  Polignac  cenacle  ; 
such  were  the  advisers,  the  influencers  of  the  queen. 

But  in  condemning  the  fatal  frivolities  of  Marie  An- 
toinette's early  days  let  us  not  be  blind  to  the  many 
excuses  that  can  be  made  for  her.  She  was  young,  she 
was  beautiful ;  she  belonged  to  an  age  which  believed 
in  the  divine  right  of  kings  and  kindred  superstitions  ; 
she  was  flung  at  an  age  that  had  scarcely  passed  out 
of  childhood  into  the  corruptest  court  in  Europe  ;  she 
was  surrounded  by  dangerous  enemies  and  more  dan- 
gerous friends  ;  she  was  in  daily  contact  with  men 
whose  one  idea  was  to  become  the  favored  lover  of  the 
queen  in  the  most  practical  sense,  and  who  were  sure 
to  be  converted  into  foes  by  any  rebuff  ;  worst  of  all, 
she  was  married  to  Louis  XVI.  Even  under  ordinary 


j54  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

conditions  Louis  XVI.  would  have  been  a  trying,  un- 
attractive husband  for  a  woman  like  Marie  Antoinette. 
The  monarch  who  would  come  to  greet  his  beautiful 
and  dainty  consort  with  hands  all  grimy  from  his  stithy 
welt  deserved  to  be  called  "My  god  Vulcan"  by  the 
Venus  of  Versailles.  But  there  were  graver  reasons 
why  Louis  XVI.  was  an  unfortunate  husband  for  Marie 
Antoinette.  It  seems  perfectly  certain  that  Louis  XVI., 
for  certain  physical  reasons,  was  not  the  man  to  make 
a  good  husband  of ;  it  seems  perfectly  certain  that  for 
a  very  long  time  after  the  formal  marriage  Louis  XVI. 
and  Marie  Antoinette  were  husband  and  wife  only  in 
name.  The  subject  is  a  delicate  one ;  it  is  treated  of 
again  and  again  most  indelicately  in  the  gossip,  the 
lampoons,  the  verses  of  the  day  ;  it  suggests  itself  often 
in  the  early  letters  of  Marie  Antoinette  to  her  mother. 
An  operation  upon  the  king's  person  was  essential ;  it 
was  long  postponed  ;  it  was  at  last  performed  and 
proved  successful.  The  Queen  of  France  became  a 
mother.  We  need  pay  no  heed  to  the  slanders  of  Or- 
leans, who,  lusting  for  the  crown  himself,  declared  that 
"the  son  of  Coigny  shall  never  be  my  king."  We 
need  pay  no  heed  to  the  sneers  of  the  Count  of  Prov- 
ence. There  is  not  the  slightest  reason  to  assume  for 
a  moment  that  the  children  of  Marie  Antoinette  were  not 
the  children  of  Louis  XVI.  as  well.  But  in  nudging 
the  character  of  Marie  Antoinette,  in  deploring  the 
frivolity,  the  flightiness  which  characterized  so  much 
of  her  early  court  life,  we  must  bear  in  mind  the  cu- 
rious physical  conditions  which  accompanied  her  mar- 
ried life,  and,  remembering  how  much  the  happiness  of 
all  men  and  all  women  depends  upon  such  physical  con- 
ditions, we  must  be  prepared  to  make  much  allowance 
for  the  beautiful,  wayward,  unhappy  Queen  of  France. 


1770-79.  RUMOR'S  TONGUES.  155 

A  great  number  of  names  have  been  from  time  to 
time  brought  forward  in  good  faith  and  in  bad  faith  as 
the  names  of  Marie  Antoinette's  lovers.  That  she  had 
many  lovers  in  the  sense  that  many  men  were  in  love 
with  her,  it  would  be  impossible,  as  it  would  be  absurd, 
to  deny.  A  young  and  beautiful  woman,  a  young  and 
beautiful  queen,  was  sure  to  have  any  number  of  adorers. 
But  it  is  alleged  again  and  again  that  many  of  these 
adorers  were  lovers  in  the  completest  sense  of  the  term. 
It  is  impossible  to  say  for  certain  that  Marie  Antoinette 
was  as  pure  as  admirers  of  the  type  of  Burke  would 
fain  have  her  to  be.  But  really  the  evidence  against 
her  is  of  the  weakest  kind.  Perhaps  the  gravest  is  to 
be  found  in  the  memoirs  of  Lauzun,  and  we  shall  see 
that  there  is,  after  all,  but  little  gravity  in  them. 

Lauzun  was  a  brilliant  blackguard,  an  incarnation  of 
all  the  graceful  and  disgraceful  vices  of  his  age.  He 
is  the  ornament  and  rose  of  a  foul  state,  the  typical 
courtier  and  soldier  of  a  decadent  epoch.  Educated, 
as  he  says,  well-nigh  upon  the  lap  of  Madame  de  Pom- 
padour, he  soon  approved  himself  a  worthy  pupil  of  her 
philosophy.  He  lived  the  life  of  his  time  and  of  his 
class  to  the  extreme,  reeled  like  a  vulgar  Faustus  from 
desire  to  satiety,  and  from  satiety  to  desire.  Life  to 
him  was  one  long  round  of  women,  cards,  horse-racing, 
tempered  only  by  occasional  facile  diplomacy  and  by 
a  perfect  Avillingness  to  play  a  soldier's  part  whenever 
called  upon.  His  intrigues  have  made  him  famous  or 
infamous  in  an  age  of  intrigue  ;  his  name  has  become 
a  proverb  among  the  profligate ;  he  rivals,  but  he  does 
not  surpass,  Richelieu.  There  could  hardly  be  a  more 
perfect  proof  of  the  inevitable  Revolution  than  the  life 
of  such  a  man,  and  yet  the  life  is  interesting  and  emi- 
nently picturesque.  In  the  evil  panorama  of  his  me- 


156  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

raoirs  there  is  one  pretty  picture  to  be  gleaned — when 
the  lad  Lauzun,  as  yet  a  child,  and  standing  eagerly  upon 
the  threshold  of  experience,  falls  in  love  with  the  girl  act- 
ress of  the  theatre.  We  are  reminded  of  the  Daphnis 
and  Chloe  of  Longus,  in  their  stolen  meeting,  with  its  in- 
nocent, ignorant  caresses,  a  meeting  suddenly  interrupted 
by  the  apparition  of  a  large  spider,  which  neither  of  them 
was  courageous  enough  to  kill,  and  which  frightened 
the  babyish  lovers  away,  as  the  spider  in  our  nursery 
legend  frightened  away  the  memorable  Miss  Muffet. 

In  estimating  the  character  of  Marie  Antoinette,  some 
importance  has  been  attached  by  her  enemies  to  the 
statements  of  Lauzun.  In  Lauzun's  memoirs  he  dis- 
tinctly states  that  the  queen  was  in  love  with  him,  that 
she  practically  flung  herself  at  his  head,  that  it  was  her 
delight  to  display  her  passion  for  him  in  the  most  pro- 
nounced manner  before  the  whole  court,  and  that  if  her 
attachment  for  him  was  not  actually  guilty,  it  was  only 
because  of  his  superior  prudence  and  reserve.  I  do  not 
think  it  is  in  the  least  necessary  to  question  the  gen- 
uineness of  the  memoirs  of  Lauzun.  Talleyrand  did 
indeed  vehemently  deny,  in  1818,  their  genuineness. 
But  the  word  of  Talleyrand  in  such  a  matter  need  not 
count  for  much.  A  man  of  Talleyrand's  diplomatic 
mind  and  unscrupulous  spirit  would  very  well  be  will- 
ing to  clear  the  memory  of  his  friend  by  denying  the 
authenticity  of  his  memoirs.  To  my  mind,  they  are 
perfectly  genuine  ;  to  my  mind,  they  prove  nothing 
whatever  against  the  queen.  On  Lauzun's  own  show- 
ing the  queen  was  never  his  mistress.  He  affirms,  in- 
deed, that  she  was  tortured  by  a  guilty  passion  for  him; 
but  Lauzun  was  one  of  those  men  who  are  vexed  by  a 
semi-feminine  belief  in  their  own  unfailing  powers  of 
attraction.  The  fine  flower  of  a  corrupt  court  and  a 


1749-94.  LAUZUX  AND  HIS  MEMOIRS.  157 

corrupt  age,  he  had  made  so  many  conquests,  enjoyed 
so  many  intrigues,  played  at  love  with  so  many  pretty 
women  of  all  kinds,  actresses  and  aristocrats,  that  he 
had  come  to  believe  himself  irresistible.  The  victim 
of  a  semi-sentimentalized  erotomania,  he  saw  every- 
where the  victims  of  his  charms,  and  it  is  not  sur- 
prising that  he  imagined  the  queen  herself  to  be  his 
slave.  That  he  was  a  despicable  rascal,  a  disgrace  to 
the  name  of  gentleman,  an  unchivalrous  rogue,  his  me- 
moirs make  sufficiently  clear.  With  his  morality,  with 
the  morality  of  the  women  who  loved  him  or  lusted 
after  him,  we  have  nothing  to  do.  It  is  the  baseness 
of  heart  which  led  him  to  set  his  love-secrets  down  on 
paper,  to  betray  with  incredible  meanness  the  long  suc- 
cession of  his  mistresses,  which  makes  him  loathsome 
in  all  eyes.  It  is,  indeed,  a  striking  tribute  to  the  vir- 
tue of  Marie  Antoinette  that  this  slanderous  cur  did 
not  dare  to  describe  her  as  his  mistress.  It  is  hard  to 
know  what  held  his  unscrupulous  hand,  and  we  can 
only  conceive  that  some  glimmering  tradition  of  truth- 
fulness, while  allowing  him  to  warp  a  few  signs  of 
royal  favor  into  the  declarations  of  a  guilty  passion, 
did  not  permit  him  directly  to  state  in  defiance  of  the 
facts  that  he  had  been,  actually  and  physically,  the 
queen's  lover.  The  very  interview  which  he  describes 
•  with  the  queen,  in  which  he  pictures  Marie  Antoinette 
as  falling  into  his  arms  and  well-nigh  soliciting  his  em- 
braces, is  to  be  very  differently  understood  when  in- 
terpreted by  the  light  of  Madame  Campan's  statements. 
She  mentions  the  interview,  declares  that  the  door  of  the 
queen's  room  was  opened,  that  Marie  Antoinette  indig- 
nantly ordered  Lauzun  to  leave  her,  that  Lauzun  depart- 
ed in  silence,  and  that  the  queen,  turning  to  Madame  Cam- 
pan,  said,  "  That  man  shall  never  come  near  me  again," 


158  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

Lauzun's  later  actions  are  much  more  characteristic 
of  the  impertinent  lover,  repulsed  and  revengeful,  than 
of  the  triumphant  favorite  of  the  queen.  He  became 
one  of  her  bitterest  enemies,  and  went  his  unworthy 
wav  to  his  doom.  It  is  fortunate  for  history  that  this 
ungentle  gentleman  was  not  as  unprincipled  a  liar  as 
he  was  a  profligate.  While  we  shudder  over  the  treach- 
ery with  which  be  revenged  his  mortified  vanity  by 
writing  down  his  calumny  of.  the  queen,  we  cannot  but 
rejoice  that  he  did  no  more.  It  would  have  been  so 
easy  for  him  just  then  to  lie  harder,  to  pull  a  longer 
bow.  As  it  is,  his  memoirs  are  not  much  of  a  weapon 
against  the  character  of  Marie  Antoinette.  There  is, 
of  course,  nothing  inherently  impossible  in  the  sugges- 
tion that  Marie  Antoinette  may  have  been  attracted  by 
such  a  handsome  court  butterfly  as  Lauzun.  We  must 
remember  the  conditions  of  the  courtly  life  ;  we  must 
remember  the  profound  corruption  of  manners,  of  mo- 
rality, of  literature,  of  the  time  ;  we  must  remember 
the  extraordinary  blending  of  scepticism  and  sentimen- 
tality which  characterized  the  refined  depravity  of  the 
century,  in  estimating  the  character  of  the  queen  and 
of  any  other  woman  of  that  age.  The  court  of  France 
was  not  an  atmosphere  in  which  virtue  flourished.  The 
conditions  of  Marie  Antoinette's  life  were  exception- 
ally unfavorable  to  virtue.  Married  in  her  early  youth 
to  a  passionless  man  of  sluggish  blood,  denied  the  wifely 
rights  for  long  enough,  troubled  in  body  and  soul  by 
such  physical  indifference,  surrounded  by  homage,  com- 
pliment, adoration  ;  what  an  ordeal  for  such  a  woman 
in  such  an  age  ! 

Unhappily  Louis  XVI.  was  not  the  kind  of  monarch 
to  mellow  with  time  ;  he  was  not,  in  the  words  of  Du- 
roas's  Planchet,  a  "bonne  pate  d'homme/'  and  time 


1774-89.  A  COMIC  KING.  159 

only  intensified  his  defects.  If  he  was  weak  and  fool- 
ish when  he  came  to  the  throne,  he  was  weak  and  fool- 
ish still  after  many  years  of  reign.  Physically  he  so- 
lidified, mentally  he  stultified  into  a  monarch  more 
and  more  ridiculous,  more  and  more  unsuited  to  the 
critical  conditions  of  the  time.  It  is  a  little  ironical 
that  his  very  virtues  were  in  some  respects  his  greatest 
failings.  We  may  wonder  when  we  find  a  Count  de 
Tilly  declaring  that  "a  king  steeped  in  vices  and  im- 
moralities might  possibly  have  saved  us,  but  we  were 
fated  to  perish  through  a  king  whose  weakness  neutral- 
ized all  his  virtues."  Yet  it  is  just  possible  that  a  king 
like  Henri  Quatre,  if  such  a  king  could  have  sprung 
from  the  weakened  Bourbon  blood,  a  king  like  Louis 
Quatorze,  might  have  for  the  time  being  saved  "us" — 
saved,  that  is,  the  nobility  that  did  not  in  the  least  de- 
serve saving.  But  Louis  XVI.  was  not  the  man  to 
save  anything  except  his  pocket  money.  His  bour- 
geois virtues  looked  ridiculous  to  a  court  that  lusted 
after  the  recollections  of  the  late  reign  and  the  tradi- 
tions of  the  Regency,  and  outside  the  circle  of  the  court 
they  either  were  not  believed  in  or  failed  to  make  the 
least  impression.  The  poor  man  who  might  have  been 
happy  enough  as  a  small  shopkeeper,  or  better  still  as  a 
small  gamekeeper,  was  ludicrously  out  of  place  in  his 
unwelcome  trade  of  king.  To  the  world  at  large,  Louis 
XVI.  in  1789  was  a  feeble,  vacillating,  comic  individ- 
ual, at  once  shy  and  brutal,  with  a  weakness  for  mean 
economies,  and  a  weakness  for  too  much  wine — the  de- 
graded and  unlovely  Gambrinus  of  a  comic  opera.  A 
king  may  be  many  things  and  hold  his  crown  fast ;  but 
there  is  one  thing  he  must  never  be,  and  that  is,  comic. 
Good-bye  to  the  king  who  is  the  laughing-stock  of  his 
people.  It  is  all  very  well  to  be  the  King  Yvetot  of  a 


160  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

broad  ballad  ;  but  the  nightcap  of  Beranger's  monarch 
contrasts  too  oddly  with  the  imperial  purple  of  the 
throne.  It  is  by  no  means  clear  that  the  accusations 
made  against  Louis  of  an  overfondness  for  the  flagon 
were  based  on  very  substantial  facts.  He  is  defended 
against  the  accusation,  not  too  skilfully,  by  the  Count 
d'Hezecques.  But  it  was  enough  for  him  to  be  re- 
garded by  the  people  at  large  as  the  "  drunkard  king," 
and,  were  he  as  abstemious  as  Pythagoras,  it  would  be 
of  no  avail.  Caricaturing  Paris  stuck  a  bottle  into  the 
pocket  of  the  monarch  it  derided  ;  Louis  had  the  same 
unhappy  sort  of  reputation  which  in  after-days  fell 
upon  that  Prussian  king  who  was  so  unjustly  baptized 
as  "  King  Clicquot."  If  Louis  did  drink,  we  may  be 
sure  it  was  with  no  such  poetic  pleasure  in  red  wine  as 
that  which  animates  the  Persian  of  Hafiz,  the  Greek  of 
the  pseudo-Anacreon,  or  the  Vaux  de  Vire  of  Olivier 
Basselin.  His  drinking  must  have  been  a  stolid  sort  of 
business.  The  picture  we  have  of  him  coming  back 
from  the  chase  at  Rambouillet,  half  asleep,  heavy,  daz- 
zled by  the  lights,  helped  up-stairs  by  obsequious,  sneer- 
ing valets,  who  assume  their  weary  king  to  be  dead 
drunk,  is  not  a  kingly  picture.  Louis  always  had  a 
kind  of  gross  interest  in  his  food,  which  we  shall  find 
yet  coming  out,  comically  and  yet  pathetically  crude,  at 
a  time  when  other  thoughts  than  the  thoughts  of  wine 
and  chicken  would  better  have  become  him. 

If  he  was  derided  by  the  public,  Louis  was  little 
loved  in  the  circles  of  the  court.  He  was  shy,  and  his 
shyness  made  him  hate  new  faces  ;  he  was  rough  and 
rude,  and  his  rudeness  made  him  incessant  enemies, 
whom  he  could  ill  afford  to  have  as  enemies.  His  only 
serious  passion  and  preoccupation  was  the  chase,  and 
his  famous  diary  is  one  of  the  most  dismal  monuments 


1774-89.  AN  UNKINGLY  KING.  161 

of  human  folly  that  fantastic  chance  has  preserved  to 
us.  His  queer  habit  of  putting  down  the  word  "rien," 
"nothing,"  on  every  day  when  he  did  not  hunt  some- 
thing has  caused  some  of  the  most  ironic  juxtaposi- 
tions in  this  journal.  As,  for  example,  where  we  find 
such  entries  as  these  :  "  To-day  nothing  ;  remonstrances 
of  the  Parliament."  "Nothing  ;  death  of  M.  de  Mau- 
repas."  "Nothing;  retirement  of  M.  Necker."  Other 
entries  yet  more  significant  will  be  made  in  that  diary 
before  the~  poor  king  is  done  with  it.  He  was  only 
happy  when  he  was  hunting,  killing  all  manner  of  game, 
from  the  wild  boar  and  the  stag  to  the  simple  swallow  ; 
he  was  unhappy  when  a  cold  in  his  head  or  some  ab- 
surd matter  in  connection  with  the  government  of  the 
country  interfered  with  his  pastime.  It  was  a  great  priv- 
ilege to  be  permitted  to  join  in  the  royal  hunting-par- 
ties, and  yet  by  no  means  always  a  pleasant  privilege- 
Tremendous  proofs  of  nobility  going  back  to  the  fif- 
teenth century  had  to  be  furnished,  and  when  they 
were  furnished  the  bearer  of  some  illustrious  or  ancient 
name  often  found  the  glory  of-  sharing  in  the  royal 
pleasure  sorely  discounted  by  the  ignominy  of  having 
to  endure  the  running  fire  of  the  somewhat  brutal  royal 
pleasantries  at  the  expense  of  the  bearer  of  an  unfamil- 
iar face. 

The  ordinary  enjoyments  of  the  court  were  detest- 
able to  Louis.  He  hated  late  hours  ;  he  hated  come- 
dies and  parties  ;  he  hated  all  play  save  loto  and  whist 
for  small  stakes  ;  he  hated,  indeed,  everything  courtly 
except  the  solemnities  of  courtly  ceremonial  which  al- 
lowed him  to  mask  his  native  timidity  under  the  frigid 
mask  of  etiquette.  His  native  timidity  needed  some 
such  mask.  The  king's  bearing  was  not  kingly  ;  the 
royal  face  was  not  royal.  From  the  loyal  portraits  of 
I.— 11 


162 


THE   FKENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 


the  time  that  flatter  the  lineaments  of  a  failing  race, 
from  the  savage  caricatures  that  accentuate  malignly 
all  its  defects,  from  servility  and  from  satire  alike,  we 
can  gather  a  fairly  clear  impression  of  that  weak,  com- 
monplace face,  with  its  high,  slanting  forehead,  its  full 
nose,  its  protruding  lips,  weak  chin,  swollen,  flabby  jowl 
and  thick  neck.  It  was  a  foolish  face,  with  its  whimsi- 
cal, vacant  expression  of  rustic  good-humor  spreading 
over  its  heavy  cheeks  and  prominent  lack-lustre  eyes, 
its  heavy,  drooping  eyelids  and  thick  ej^ebrows.  Ma- 
dame Campan,  who  would  no  doubt  willingly  flatter, 
tries  to  infuse  a  tinge  of  melancholy  into  the  vapid 
beatitude  of  the  face,  but  has  to  admit,  what  every  one 
else  from  De  Besenval  to  D'Allonville  admits,  that  Louis 
lacked  all  nobility  of  carriage.  The  less  courtly  criti- 
cism of  Barere  depicts  the  unwholesomely  pale  face,  the 
expressionless  bluish  eyes,  the  loud  laugh  that  had  some- 
thing imbecile  in  its  mirth,  the  ignoble  massiveness  of 
the  bulk,  the  hopeless  awkwardness  of  the  bearing. 
That  he  was  slovenly  to  a  degree,  even  Campan  admits, 
and  her  waiting-maid  mind  despairs  over  his  ill-adjusted 
clothes  and  the  persistent  untidiness  of  his  hair.  There 
never  was  a  king  less  calculated  to  dominate  a  brilliant, 
audacious,  and  corrupt  court,  to  impress  a  sceptical  and 
critical  people,  and  to  captivate  a  beautiful  and  ambi- 
tious wife.  Destiny  did  the  house  of  Capet  the  worst 
turn  in  the  world  when  it  adorned  its  line  with  a  prince 
endowed  with  many  virtues,  and  no  capacity  for  using 
those  virtues  for  the  benefit  of  his  people,  his  party,  or 
himself. 

But  if  the  king  was  bad  from  the  kingly  standpoint, 
perhaps  his  two  royal  brothers  of  Provence  and  Artois 
were  worse.  If  Louis  XVI.  was  a  stupid  king,  Prov- 
ence and  Artois  would  not  have  done  any  better  in  his 


1774-89.  BROTHER  OF  PROVENCE.  163 

place  ;  the  time  was  yet  to  come  when  they  did  for  a 
season  sit  on  the  royal  throne,  each  in  his  turn,  and  not 
distinguish  themselves.  That  is  far  ahead.  When  Ma- 
rie Antoinette  first  saw  them  they  were  still  very  young, 
with  the  graces  and  the  possibilities  of  youth.  In  1789 
they  had  given  their  measure,  and  a  very  bad  measure 
too.  But  they  were  very  different  from  the  king,  and 
very  different  from  each  other.  It  was  said  of  them  that 
they  only  resembled  each  other  in  one  thing — their  mar- 
riages. They  had  married  two  sisters,  princesses  of 
the  house  of  Piedmont — princesses  whom  nobody  much 
liked,  and  who  were  conspicuous  for  no  great  merits  or 
defects.  In  all  other  things  Provence  and  Artois  were 
wide  as  the  poles  asunder.  Provence  was  plethoric, 
pompous,  priggish,  a  huge  eater  and  drinker,  with  un- 
wieldy body  swollen  by  overfeeding  and  lack  of  exer- 
cise. On  his  ungainly  existence  an  affectation  of  liter- 
ature and  learning  sat  most  ungracefully.  It  pleased 
him  to  pose  as  a  man  of  taste,  to  linger  long  hours  in 
his  library,  to  write  little  mean  paragraphs  for  the  press, 
and  little  mean  pamphlets,  to  ape  a  philosophic  calm. 
When  the  expected  birth  of  a  dauphin  dispelled  his  im- 
mediate and  fondly  cherished  hopes  for  a  swift  succes- 
sion— hopes  that  were  flattered  and  fostered  by  a  little 
army  of  adulators — he  wrote  about  his  disappointment 
with  a  pedantic  assumption  of  serenity  which  seems 
sufficiently  ridiculous  to  us,  and  seemed,  let  us  hope, 
sufficiently  ridiculous  to  the  King  of  Sweden,  to  whom 
it  was  addressed.  He  liked  to  get  about  him  men  of 
letters,  wits,  and  scholars,  to  quote  verses  with  an  as- 
sumption of  intelligence,  and  to  parade  fragments  of 
Latin.  In  appearance  he  was  like  the  king,  his  brother, 
but  with  a  difference.  The  forehead  was  lower,  the 
nose  smaller,  the  chin  less  feeble,  the  throat  less  full, 


164  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  X. 

the  general  expression  less  benign.  There  was  some- 
thing irritable,  something  sourly  aggressive,  something 
rat-like  about  his  countenance  which  was  curiously  dis- 
agreeable. 

Artois  was  strikingly  unlike  his  royal  brother  or  his 
brother  Provence  in  character.  He  seems  to  have  start- 
ed in  life  with  the  determination  to  be,  like  Young  Mar- 
low,  an  Agreeable  Rattle,  and  to  have  succeeded  in  mak- 
ing himself  a  Disagreeable  Rattle.  In  his  youth  he 
strove  to  play  that  kind  of  page  part  which  was  not 
then  typified  and  immortalized  by  Beaumarchais's  Cher- 
ubin,  and  he  continued  to  play  the  same  part  long  after 
it  had  ceased  in  the  least  degree  to  become  him.  He  was 
as  frivolous  and  empty-headed  as  a  man  well  could  be, 
and  seemed  to  take  a  kind  of  pitiable  pride  in  his  frivol- 
ity and  his  empty  head.  He  loved  to  gamble,  to  revel  in 
a  kind  of  skittish,  skipping,  grotesquely  boyish  kind  of 
way,  which  had  in  it  nothing  so  dignified  as  the  dog- 
gedness  of  the  vices  of  Orleans,  nor  so  unconscious  and 
innate  as  the  vices  of  Lauzun.  Where  his  brother 
Provence  played  at  pedant,  he  played  at  profligate  ;  the 
queen  liked  him  as  much  as  she  disliked  Provence  ;  he 
did  his  best  gravely  to  compromise  the  queen  by  the 
intolerable  license  of  his  manners  and  speech  to  her — 
manners  and  speech  which  aroused  time  and  again  the 
indignation  and  the  protests  of  Mercy.  He  was  better- 
looking  than  Provence,  brisker  in  expression,  of  a  fairer 
favor,  alerter  in  his  bearing,  a  sufficiently  dashing,  sol- 
dierly prince.  He  it  is  of  whom  Mercier  tells  the  tale 
of  his  skin-tight  breeches  into  which  he  had  to  be 
dropped  by  four  tall  lackeys — the  most  interesting  tale 
about  him. 

Such  were  the  prominent  persons  in  the  great  court 
drama,  such  the  meddlers  and  muddlers  who  were  finally 


1774-89.  NEGLECTED  OPPORTUNITIES.  165 

to  laud  France  in  full  revolution  and  send  the  fine  flower 
of  the  French  nobility  skipping  basely  over  the  frontier. 
The  courtly  party  had  their  chance  time  and  again  ;  sal- 
vation lay  in  their  way  more  than  once,  and  they  daffed 
it  lightly  aside.  Salvation  was  never  nearer  to  them 
than  now,  when  a  Minister  of  Marine  was  called  to  the 
Controllership  of  the  Finances,  and  what  looked  like  a 
fair  field  lay  open  to  Turgot. 


166  TilE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XI. 


CHAPTER  XI. 

TURGOT. 

IP  the  god  Thor,  oblivious  for  the  moment  of  his 
hammer  and  his  goats  and  the  tests  of  Utgarda  Loke, 
could  have  looked  down  from  his  cloudy  Scandinavian 
heaven  upon  France  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  he  might  have  seen  a  sight  in  which  he  might 
naturally  be  expected  to  take  an  interest.  A  youthful 
abbe  in  his  clerical  cassock  playing  at  battledore  and 
shuttlecock  with  an  exceedingly  pretty  young  lady  whom 
he  called  Minette  —  such  was  the  idyllic  sight  which 
might  be  supposed  to  deserve  the  attention  of  the  war- 
god  of  the  North.  For  that  alert  young  abbe,  with  the 
wise,  boyish  face,  who  seemed  so  devoted  to  the  dainty 
Minette,  was  actually  the  war-god's  namesake,  and  his 
ancestors,  it  would  seem,  claimed  to  be  sprung  from  the 
war-god's  loins.  The  young  abbe's  name  was  Turgot, 
and  Turgot  means  Thor  God,  and  it  might  have  sur- 
prised and  perplexed  the  Thor  God  of  the  hammer  to 
know  that  the  Thor  God  of  the  battledore  was  going  to 
accomplish  things  more  amazing  than  any  recorded  of 
his  illustrious  ancestor,  and  was  to  help  to  shake  the 
foundations  of  the  established  world. 

The  great  Turgot  was  born  in  Paris  on  May  10, 1727. 
He  came  of  an  excellent  Normandy  breed,  rich  in  suc- 
cessful names.  Somewhere  in  the  sixteenth  century  the 
family  branched  into  two,  the  Turgots  of  Tourailles  and 
the  Turgots  of  Saint-Glair.  Our  Turgot  came  of  the 


1727-81.  TURGOT.  167 

Saint-Glairs.  It  is  curious  to  find  that  in  the  early  sev- 
enteenth century  a  Turgot  of  Tourailles  knocked  on  the 
head  in  a  scuffle  by  an  inn  a  certain  Protestant  soldier 
of  fortune  named  Montchretien.  This  Montchretien 
had  written  some  tragedies  of  no  importance  and  a  prose 
work  of  very  considerable  importance,  because  it  brought 
for  the  first  time  a  very  famous  term  into  literature. 
Montchretien's  book  was  called  "  Traite  d'Econoinie  Po- 
litique."  It  is  a  curious  example  of  the  "  supreme  ironic 
procession"  part  of  existence  that  the  inventor  of  the 
term  "political  economy"  should  meet  his  death  at  the 
hands  of  a  namesake  of  one  of  the  most  famous  teachers 
of  political  economy  who  ever  lived. 

Our  Turgot  was  the  youngest  son  of  Michel  Etienne 
Turgot,  an  excellent  prevot  des  marchands  in  Paris  and 
builder  of  a  dram  as  famous  as  that  of  Tarquinius  Pris- 
ons. Michel  Etienne  had  one  daughter,  who  married 
the  Duke  de  Saint- Aignan,  and  three  sons,  of  whom  the 
eldest  became  a  sufficiently  eminent  magistrate  and  the 
second  a  sufficiently  eminent  soldier.  The  third  son  was 
a  curious  blend  of  precocity  and  timidity.  All  his  life 
he  was  awkward,  bashful,  nervous  ;  all  his  life,  too,  he 
preserved  the  extraordinary  capacity  for  study,  the  ex- 
traordinary power  of  work,  which  characterized  his  early 
youth.  He  was  educated  at  that  College  Louis-le-Grand 
upon  whose  roll  such  strange  names  were  yet  to  be  in- 
scribed ;  while  he  was  only  sixteen  years  old  he  attended 
the  theological  lectures  at  the  Sorbonne,  and,  after  ob- 
taining special  permission,  on  account  of  his  youth,  to 
be  examined,  passed  his  examination  with  conspicuous 
success.  The  young  Abbe  de  Laulne — he  bore  this  name 
from  a  paternal  estate — rose  from  success  to  success, 
passed  examination  after  examination  brilliantly,  was 
elected  a  prior  of  Sorbonne,  made  some  admirable  Latin 


1(58  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cu.  XI. 

speeches  in  fulfilment  of  the  duties  of  the  office,  and 
wrote  his  first  work  on  political  economy  in  attack  upon 
Law's  system.  His  friends  were  enthusiastic,  pressed 
him  to  enter  the  Church,  predicted  speedy  bishoprics ; 
but  to  their  surprise  and  disappointment  Turgot  an- 
nounced his  intention  of  giving  up  the  Church,  and  in 
the  December  of  1750  he  definitely  left  the  Sorbonne, 
and  turned  his  thoughts  to  other  things. 

Even  in  that  age  of  astonishing  young  men  Turgot 
was  astonishing.  He  was  only  twenty-three  years  old 
when  he  left  the  Sorbonne,  but  he  was  already  an  ac- 
complished economist,  a  profound  thinker,  a  theoretic 
statesman.  Leon  Say  says  of  him  that  while  he  was  yet 
at  the  Sorbonne  he  had  already  in  his  mind  everything 
which  came  out  of  it  afterwards,  and  that  the  work  of 
the  last  thirty  years  of  his  life  was  merely  the  produc- 
tion in  broad  daylight  of  the  mental  stores  acquired  in 
the  Sorbonne.  From  the  moment  of  his  leaving  the 
Sorbonne  to  the  moment  in  which  the  controllei'-gener- 
alship  came  into  his  hands,  life  was  for  Turgot  a  series 
of  repeated  triumphs.  His  final  fall  was,  could  he  but 
have  known  it,  but  his  greatest  triumph.  Deputy  So- 
licitor-General, Councillor  in  the  Parliament,  Maitre  des 
Requetes,  Limoges  Intendant,  these  are  the  stepping- 
stones  of  his  progress  from  1752  to  1761.  During  all 
that  period  he  moved  and  shone  in  the  most  cultured 
Parisian  society.  He  was  a  friend  of  Madame  Geoff rin, 
of  Mademoiselle  de  1'Espinasse,  of  Madame  de  Graffigny, 
of  Condorcet,  of  Helvetius,  of  D'Alembert  and  the  brill- 
iant Encyclopaedic  stars,  of  the  excellent  Morellet,  of 
Quesnay  and  Quesnay's  devoted  servant,  old  Mirabeau 
the  "friend  of  man,"  of  Gournay.  He  was  the  corre- 
spondent of  Adam  Smith,  whom  he  met  later  at  Ques- 
nay's house  ;  he  was  the  friend  and  correspondent  of 


1W1-61.  TURGOT  AX  ENCYCLOPEDIST  169 

Voltaire  —  though  correspondence  came  near  once  to 
severing  the  friendship.  He  was  for  a  little  while  the 
acquaintance  of  Madame  du  Deffand  and  of  her  great 
friend  the  Duke  de  Choiseul,  but  the  acquaintance  soon 
faded  out  of  existence  and  merged  on  the  part  of  Ma- 
dame du  Deffand  and  De  Choiseul  into  active  dislike. 
He  was  the  friend  and  something  more  than  the  friend 
of  the  beautiful  Mademoiselle  de  Ligneville,  whom  her 
aunt  Madame  de  Graftigny  always  called  Minette.  It 
is  one  of  the  minor  mysteries  of  history  why  Turgot  did 
not  marry  Minette.  They  seem  to  have  been  tenderly 
attached  ;  excellent  Morellet  is  in  despair  because  the 
attachment  did  not  end  in  marriage.  Some  solve  the 
problem  by  suggesting,  without  decisively  proving,  that 
Turgot  was  actually  in  holy  orders  at  the  time.  Others 
consider  that  he  was  too  busy,  too  practical  a  man  to 
hamper  his  career  with  the  cares  of  a  wife  and  a  possible 
family.  Others,  again,  suggest  that  Turgot,  threatened 
with  hereditary  gout  and  convinced  that  it  was  the  des- 
tiny of  his  race  to  be  short-lived,  was  unwilling  to  link 
a  woman's  fate  with  his.  Whatever  the  reasons,  the 
certain  fact  remains  that  Turgot  did  not  marry  Minette 
or  any  one  else,  that  Minette  married  the  wise  Helvetius, 
and  that  Turgot  and  Madame  Helvetius  remained  f  riend-s 
all  their  lives. 

la  1751  the  first  volume  of  the  famous  "Encyclopae- 
dia "  made  its  appearance.  Turgot  was  soon  drawn  into 
the  magic  circle  of  its  contributors,  and  wrote  five  ar- 
ticles for  it,  on  Etymology,  Existence,  Expansibility, 
Fairs  and  Markets,  and  Endowments.  The  article  on 
"Existence"  made  its  mark  upon  thinkers  then,  has 
made  its  mark  upon  thinkers  since.  But  though  Tur- 
got's  connection  with  the  "Encyclopaedia"  was  brilliant, 
it  was  not  of  long  duration.  An  imbecile  government 


1/70  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XI. 

suppressed  the  "Encyclopaedia,"  and  Turgot,  as  an  offi- 
cial servant  of  that  government,  did  not  think  it  be- 
coming or  compatible  with  his  duties  to  leave  his  name 
upon  the  Encyclopaedic  list.  It  is  to  be  regretted  that 
the  fine  genius  of  Turgot  could  not  continue  to  be  asso- 
ciated to  the  end  with  the  monumental  work  of  the 
"Encyclopaedia,"  more  indeed  for  the  sake  of  the  "En- 
cyclopaedia" than  for  the  sake  of  Turgot.  His  own 
written  works  are  not  voluminous,  but  they  are  abun- 
dant, inasmuch  as  they  set  forth  sufficiently  the  eco- 
nomic doctrines  of  his  life,  that  life  which  was  in  itself 
the  best  and  the  most  convincing  of  all  his  works. 

On  August  8,  1761,  Turgot  was  appointed  to  the  in- 
tendance  of  Limoges,  and  for  thirteen  years,  until  1774, 
he  devoted  himself  to  his  task  and  tempered  his  theo- 
retic soul  in  the  practical  work  of  statesmanship.  The 
duties  of  an  iutendant  were  many  and  varied,  the  power 
of  an  intendant  very  considerable.  At  that  time  France 
was  divided  into  forty  military  divisions  called  Prov- 
inces, under  the  command  of  a  governor,  and  thirty-five 
administrative  circumscriptions  called  "generalites,"  un- 
der the  direction  of  an  intendant.  Like  most  of  the 
other  administrative  arrangements  of  the  Old  Order, 
these  divisions  were  very  muddled  and  confusing.  The 
provinces  and  generalities  were  not  uniform  in  extent 
or  identical  in  limit.  They  overlapped  each  other  so 
much  that  there  were  generally  several  intendants  for 
one  governor  and  several  governors  for  one  intendant. 
The  functions  of  governor  and  intendant  were  entirely 
independent.  The  intendants  looked  after  the  police, 
the  militia,  and  public  charities ;  they  had  the  power 
of  deciding  on  litigious  cases  connected  with  taxes  ; 
they  were  maitres  des  requetes,  and  had  the  right  to  sit 
with  the  other  maitres  des  requetes  when  in  Paris ;  they 


1761-74.  TtRGOTS  REFORMS.  171 

were  in  the  first  place  financial  agents.  Turgot  now 
entered  upon  all  these  various  and  complex  duties  and 
proceeded  to  amaze  his  peers.  Never  before,  unhappily 
for  the  Old  Order,  had  such  an  intendant  been  known. 
Unhappily,  too,  for  most  of  the  adherents  of  the  Old 
Order,  they  never  wanted  to  see  such  an  intendant 
again.  Still  more  unhappily  for  them,  they  did  not  get 
the  chance. 

Turgot  found  himself  in  the  midst  of  a  network  of 
corrupt  and  degrading  traditions,  which  he  proceeded 
to  break  through  with  the  ease  and  the  determination 
of  the  strong  man.  He  found  the  people  suffering  griev- 
ously under  the  oppressions  and  exactions  of  the  greater 
and  the  lesser  nobility,  and  he  set  to  work  with  uncom- 
promising courage  to  reform  it  altogether.  Naturally 
enough,  he  won  the  affection  of  the  peasantry,  not  much 
given  as  a  rule  to  entertaining  affectionate  feelings  tow- 
ards their  intendants.  Naturally,  too,  he  won  the  de- 
testation of  the  astounded  and  indignant  nobility  and 
gentry.  That  an  intendant,  one  of  a  class  that  had 
always  thought  with  them  and  acted  with  them,  should 
take  it  upon  himself  to  interfere  with  their  privileges 
and  to  write  and  talk  preposterously  about  ameliorat- 
ing the  lot  of  the  peasantry  was  an  innovation  of  a  kind 
not  to  be  endured.  For  thirteen  years  they  had  to  en- 
dure it,  however,  while  Turgot  toiled  at  improvement 
of  taxation,  at  making  a  survey  of  the  province,  and 
strove  with  Angouleme  crisis,  with  dearth  of  cereals, 
with  opposition  to  free  circulation  of  corn,  with  an  im- 
possible Abbe  Terray.  The  irritated  and  offended  no- 
bility held  Turgot  up  to  execration  as  a  "man  of  sys- 
tem." "The  name  of  a  man  of  system,"  Turgot  himself 
has  written,  "  has  become  a  kind  of  weapon  on  the  lips 
of  all  persons  either  prejudiced  or  interested  in  retain- 


172  TQE  FRENCH  REVoLtmoN.  CH.  XI. 

ing  certain  abuses  ;  and  it  is  levelled  against  all  those 
who  propose  changes  in  any  order  of  ideas  whatever." 

Never  did  Turgot  give  greater  proof  of  the  extraor- 
dinary vitality  and  varied  powers  of  his  mind  than 
during  this  period  of  his  Limoges  intendance.  While 
he  was  grappling  so  heroically  with  the  difficulties  in 
the  way  of  a  reforming  intendant,  while  he  was  trav- 
elling all  over  his  province  in  the  wildest  winter  sea- 
sons heedless  of  the  gout  and  rheumatism  that  racked 
him,  while  he  was  pouring  out  those  letters  and  pam- 
phlets which  are  so  many  precious  state  papers  of  po- 
litical economy,  he  still  found  time  to  keep  up  a  large 
correspondence  with  many  familiar  friends — Caillard, 
Hume,  Condorcet,  and  others — and  to  practise  some  of 
those  graceful  literary  exercises  which  are  usually  the 
decorous  occupation  of  a  learned  leisure.  He  seemed 
certainly  to  justify  the  saying  that  the  great  things  are 
only  done  by  those  who  have  no  time  to  do  them  in. 

Among  Turgot's  literary  enterprises  about  this  time 
was  an  ambitious  attempt  to  revive  the  laws  which  gov- 
ern the  prosody  of  the  ancient  Greeks  and  Romans  for 
the  benefit  of  French  versification.  The  dream  of  hap- 
pily adapting  the  hexameter  to  the  tongues  of  modern 
Europe  has  been  dreamed  by  more  than  one  scholar  in 
every  scholastic  generation.  Turgot  followed  the  dream 
so  far  as  to  render  into  French  hexameters  the  fourth 
book  of  Virgil's  "  ^Eneid."  The  result  is  not  exhilarat- 
ing to  students  of  French  verse.  If  the  exquisitely  melo- 
dious genius  of  Ronsard  and  his  brilliant  stars  suffered 
slightly  from  a  too  enthusiastic  classicism,  such  metri- 
cal talents  as  Turgot  possessed  suffered  heavily  in  the 
majestic  Olympian  measure.  But,  unluckily,  Turgot 
was  as  proud  of  his  verses  as  Richelieu  had  been  of  his 
tragedy,  as  most  men  of  genius  are  of  some  enterprise 


1761-74.  VOLTAIRE'S   CRITICISM.  173 

curiously  out  of  the  scope  of  their  genius.  He  ad- 
mired his  hexameters  immensely,  but  he  was  not  con- 
tent with  his  own  admiration.  He  wanted  the  admira- 
tion of  Voltaire  himself,  the  aged  autocrat  of  belles- 
lettres,  and  to  win  that  admiration  unbiassed  he  caused 
Caillard  to  send  them  to  Voltaire  as  the  production  of 
an  unknown  Abbe  de  Laage.  Alas  for  Turgot's  ambi- 
tion !  Voltaire  at  first  gave  no  opinion  ;  at  last,  and 
upon  pressure,  he  wrote  a  pathetic  little  letter,  in  which 
he  pleaded  old  age  and  waning  sight  as  his  excuse  for 
delay  in  expressing  his  satisfaction  at  what  he  consid- 
ered to  be  a  very  excellent  translation — in  prose.  That 
"  in  prose  "  was  a  bitter  sting  to  Turgot's  vanity.  Vol- 
taire was  doubtless  innocent  of  the  slightest  sarcasm, 
but  the  very  innocence  of  the  criticism  only  made  the 
matter  worse,  and  Turgot  said  some  very  bitter  things 
about  Voltaire's  lack  of  reasoning  faculty. 

Nobody  now,  we  should  imagine,  pastures  his  classic 
instincts  upon  Turgot's  travesty,  more  gravely  intended 
than  Scarron's,  of  the  "^Eneid."  But  one  effort  of  his  has 
made  its  mark  upon  what  Turgot's  English  contempora- 
ries would  have  called  polite  literature,  the  line  he  wrote 
under  a  portrait  of  Benjamin  Franklin: 

"Eripuit  caelo  fulmen,  sceptrumque  tyrannis  " — 

a  line  which  might  well  have  prophetically  referred  to 
other  sceptres  and  other  tyrants  than  those  Turgot  had 
in  his  mind.  Happily,  however,  it  is  not  upon  his  neat- 
ly turned  Latin  epigrams  any  more  than  upon  his  labo- 
rious Gneco-Gallic  hexameters  that  Turgot's  claim  to 
the  admiration  of  the  world  depends.  The  world  will 
remember  the  "Lettres  sur  la  Liberte  du  Commerce  des 
Grains,"  and  the  "  Reflexions  sur  la  Formation  et  la  Dis- 
tribution des  Richesses,"  when  it  has  forgotten  that  the 


!74  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XI. 

great  economist  was  also  expert  in  Latinity  and  ambi- 
tious of  a  translator's  fame. 

When  Turgot  had  been  thirteen  years  intendant  at 
Limoges  he  had  made  his  mark  pretty  plainly  upon  such 
public  opinion  as  then  existed  ;  he  was  recognized  by  a 
large  party  in  France  as  the  champion  of  reform  :  the 
one  thing  needful  for  the  due  carrying  out  of  his  plans 
was  that  he  should  become  a  cabinet  minister.  The 
same  fair  fortune  that  had  served  him  hitherto  at  every 
step  of  his  career  stood  him  in  good  stead  now.  He  be- 
came a  cabinet  minister. 

A  new  order  of  things  had  come  about.  Louis  XV., 
Louis  the  Well-beloved,  had  been  hurried  to  his  dishon- 
ored grave.  Louis  XVI.  was  King  of  France,  and  the 
grim  question,  "How  would  Berry  pull  through  with 
it?"  was  about  to  be  answered  in  all  earnest.  Berry 
had  begun,  as  we  have  seen,  by  making  De  Maurepas 
his  prime-minister,  by  sending  D'Aiguillon  to  the  right- 
about, and  by  making  it  pretty  plain  to  the  two  other 
sides  of  that  ingenious  political  triangle,  Maupeou  and 
Terray,  that  they  were  not  likely  to  adorn  their  own 
offices  much  longer.  Who  was  to  take  Terray's  place  ? 
Who  was  to  be  the  new  Controller-General  ?  The  Abbe 
de  Very,  Turgot's  intimate  friend  and  the  intimate 
friend  of  Maurepas,  said,  emphatically,  Turgot.  The 
enthusiastic  and  intelligent  Duchess  D'Enville,  of  the 
antique  La  Rochefoucauld  line,  with  which  Maurepas 
was  so  proud  to  be  linked,  said,  emphatically,  Turgot. 
The  Countess  de  Maurepas  also  said,  Turgot.  Under 
these  conditions  Maurepas  was  very  willing  ;  and  thus 
it  came  to  pass  that  Turgot  was  brought  into  the  cabi- 
net, appointed  first  of  all  to  the  Navy,  and  then  one 
month  later,  in  August,  1774,  to  the  coveted  Controller- 
Generalship. 


1774.  TURGOT   CONTROLLER-GENERAL.  175 

It  seemed  at  first  that  Turgot  would  have  to  encoun- 
ter no  very  great  difficulties  in  his  new  office.  It  seemed 
so  at  least  to  the  indifferent  lookers-on,  who  do  not  al- 
ways see  most  of  the,  game.  Turgot  himself  appreci- 
ated more  keenly  the  dangers  in  his  way.  The  young, 
beautiful,  imperious  queen,  with  her  love  for  entertain- 
ment, for  all  that  makes  life  amusing,  and  that  costs  a 
great  deal  of  money,  was  not  likely  to  be  much  of  an 
aid  to  a  reforming  minister  bent  specially  on  inculcating 
economy  upon  an  exceptionally  weak  king.  Marie  An- 
toinette did  indeed  write  to  her  mother  that  Turgot  en- 
joyed "the  reputation  of  being  a  very  honest  man," 
using,  in  so  doing,  almost  exactly  the  words  employed 
by  Mercy  in  his  letter  to  Maria  Theresa  upon  Turgot. 
But  when  Marie  Antoinette  wrote  those  words  she  had 
not  yet  found  the  "  very  honest  man  "  running  counter 
to  any  of  her  wishes.  As  for  the  king,  be  appeared  to 
be  as  pleased  with  his  new  controller-general  as  if  he 
were  a  new  and  ingenious  lock.  The  meeting  between 
them  at  Compiegne,  when  Turgot  came  to  thank  him 
for  the  appointment,  seems  to  have  been  most  royal, 
most  effective.  Turgot  was  all  gratitude,  but  he  was 
also  all  determination  ;  Louis  was  every  inch  a  king  of 
the  nobly  benevolent  type.  With  an  excess  of  gener- 
ous enthusiasm  which  was  doubtless  genuine  enough  at 
the  time,  he  pledged  himself  to  Turgot  beforehand  by 
his  word  of  honor  "to  share  all  your  views,  and  always 
support  you  in  the  courageous  steps  you  will  have  to 
take."  Poor  Louis  !  If  Turgot  had  known  him  better 
he  would  have  known  how  little  those  high-sounding 
words  represented  the  real  workings  of  that  well-mean- 
ing, most  unstable  mind.  But  Turgot  was  not  unnatu- 
rally hopeful.  He  entered  upon  office  in  the  character 
of  a  reforming  minister,  and  he  proceeded  at  once  to 


i-76  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XI. 

play  his  part.  The  programme  he  presented  to  the  king 
had  the  merits  of  brevity  and  simplicity.  It  was  ex- 
pressed in  three  terse  points — "  no  bankruptcy,  no  in- 
crease in  the  loans,  no  taxation."  This  was  the  nega- 
tive policy  ;  the  positive  policy,  the  policy  that  was  to 
make  all  this  possible,  was  simpler  and  shorter  still.  It 
was  summed  up  in  one  phrase — "  Reduce  the  expendi- 
ture." Only  reduce  the  expenditure  and  all  will  be 
well.  It  was  simple  enough  ;  but  under  the  condi- 
tions, as  Turgot  had  yet  to  find,  it  had  the  sovereign 
defect  of  being  impossible. 

It  would  be,  perhaps,  too  rash  to  say — although  the 
statement  might  be  defended — that  if  Turgot  had  been 
able  to  carry  out  thoroughly  his  programme,  with  all 
that  it  involved,  the  Revolution  would  never  have  taken 
place.  But  it  is  certain  that  if  Turgot  had  been  allowed 
a  free  hand,  the  Revolution  would  have  been  very  dif- 
ferent from  what  it  was.  Suppose  that  Turgot  had  been 
able  to  realize  all  his  hopes  ;  suppose  that  he  had  re- 
organized the  financial  condition  of  France,  had  crushed 
the  old  evil  privileges  out  of  existence,  h#d  lopped  away 
the  bulk  of  the  abuses,  had  established  the  freedom  of 
industry  and  commerce,  then  the  majority  of  the  causes 
which  created  the  Revolution  of  1789  would  have 
ceased  to  exist.  But  unhappily  for  Turgot,  and  still 
more  unhappily  for  his  enemies,  Turgot  was  not  given 
a  free  hand.  He  was  not  a  revolutionist  at  all  in  any 
sane  sense  of  the  word,  but  he  was  regarded  by  his  ad- 
versaries as  if  he  had  been  the  wildest  of  revolutionary 
fanatics.  The  farmers-general  were  terribly  fluttered 
in  their  dovecots,  the  Terrays  and  their  kind  were  hot 
against  him  ;  privilege  was  up  in  arms  everywhere. 

Turgot  soon  began  to  show  that  he  was  in  earnest  in 
his  notions  of  reform.  He  began  by  dismissing  Brochet 


1774-76.  REFORM.  177 

de  Saint- Prest,  the  director  of  the  Corn  Agency,  the  dme 
</<'innee  of  Terray  in  the  famous,  or  infamous,  "  Pacte  de 
Famine."  Terray's  scheme  was  to  establish  a  monopoly 
in  the  corn  trade — a  monopoly  to  be  in  his  hands  and 
those  of  his  creatures.  In  1770  Terray  suppressed  the 
liberal  clauses  of  the  declaration  of  1763  and  the  edict 
of  1764,  by  which  the  Controller-General  Bertrin  had 
allowed  the  free  circulation  of  corn.  Terray's  act  had 
led  to  the  writing  of  Turgot's  letters  defending  the  free 
circulation  of  corn  ;  but  Terray  played  off  the  Abbe 
Galiani  and  his  an ti- free- trade  dialogues  against  Tur- 
got's  letters,  and  coolly  went  on  with  his  scheme.  A 
very  pretty  little  plan  was  on  foot.  Laverdy,  the  then 
controller-general,  sanctioned  a  treaty  got  up  by  a  cer- 
tain number  of  individuals,  of  whom  a  retired  Paris 
banker  named  Malisset  was  one,  "  for  the  care,  the  pro- 
viding, and  the  preservation  of  the  king's  cereals."  A 
lawyer,  Leprevost  de  Beaumont,  heard  of  this  agree- 
ment, saw  in  it  a  compact  for  the  starvation  of  the  peo- 
ple, and  was  about  to  denounce  it,  when  he  was  arrested 
and  flung  into  the  Bastille.  But,  if  De  Beaumont  was 
thus  silenced,  his  threatened  opposition  had  helped  to 
kill  the  plan.  The  treaty  was  set  aside,  and  in  its  place 
the  "Regie  interessee"  was  devised.  A  commission, 
according  to  the  memoirs  on  Terray,  had  been  formed 
to  inquire  into  the  corn  business.  It  had  under  its  au- 
thority two  directors  or  agents-general  for  the  purchases 
and  transmissions,  Sorin  de  Bonne  and  Doumerc  ;  so 
that  all  abuses  in  this  branch  of  the  public  service 
ought  to  have  been  immediately  suppressed.  But  the 
councillors  of  state  complained  that  they  were  not  con- 
sulted, that  nothing  was  communicated  to  them,  and, 
indeed,  that  the  Abbe  Terray  had  always  brought  to 
them  the  work  half  done.  This  conduct  became  still 
I.— 12 


1-78  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XI. 

more  suspected  because  Brochet  de  Saint-Prest,  who 
was  Terray's  sworn  ally,  was  a  thorough  beggar  when 
he  entered  the  Council,  but  displayed  since  he  formed 
part  of  it  an  extraordinary  amount  of  opulence  and  lux- 
ury. Hence  the  supposition  arose  that  Terray  and  Bro- 
chet, far  from  checking  the  monopoly,  favored  it  and 
carried  it  on  by  their  underlings,  who,  too,  were  ex- 
tremely rich. 

Target  was  not  going  to  stop  at  the  dismissal  of  Bro- 
chet de  Saint-Prest.  A  little  later  Sorin  and  Doumerc 
were  arrested  and  their  papers  seized,  but  nothing  was 
found  to  criminate  them,  and  they  were  set  at  liberty. 
It  was  made  clear,  however,  that  Brochet  de  Saint-Prest 
had  swindled,  and  it  seemed  more  than  likely  that  Ter- 
ray had  kept  his  eyes  closed  in  very  friendly  fashion  to 
a  good  deal  of  what  was  going  on.  The  private  specu- 
lators it  was  impossible  to  get  at.  But  they  were  dis- 
gusted and  dismayed,  and  there  was  more  disgust  in  store 
for  them.  Turgot  at  once  proceeded  to  repeal  the  evil 
prohibitory  enactments  of  Terray  and  to  restore  the  corn 
trade  to  the  freedom,  limited,  indeed,  but  still  precious, 
which  had  been  accorded  to  it  by  Berlin  in  1763  and 
1764.  But  he  was  not  allowed  to  proceed  without  pro- 
test, even  from  his  own  friends.  Bertin  himself  urged 
caution  and  progress  by  slow  degrees  ;  he  would  have 
liked  Turgot  "to  conceal  your  views  and  your  opinions 
from  the  child  whom  you  have  to  govern  and  to  restore 
to  health."  There  was  another  person  who  took  upon 
himself  to  exhort  Turgot  upon  the  corn  question  Avith 
signal  ill-success  for  the  exhorter.  This  was  Necker, 
fresh  from  his  triumph  with  the  Colbert  eulogium,  and 
already  largely  convinced  of  the  vast  importance  to  the 
world  in  general,  and  to  France  in  particular,  of  his  ex- 
istence. Necker  interviewed  Turgot,  who  received  him 


1774-76.  TURGOT  AND  NECKER.  179 

with  the  affability  of  an  icicle,  and  converted  him  into 
a  civil  but  decided  enemy.  Turgot  was  always  a  shy 
man,  and,  like  many  shy  men,  concealed  his  timidity 
under  an  assumption  of  hauteur  ;  he  was  never  at  any 
time  very  tolerant  of  the  opinions  of  those  whom  he 
conceived  to  be  less  well-informed  than  himself  ;  he 
was  cold  and  rather  rude  to  Necker,  both  when  he  re- 
ceived him  and  afterwards  in  writing  to  him.  Necker 
immediately  published  his  "Legislation  sur  le  Com- 
merce des  Grams,"  which  at  once  brought  him  promi- 
nently into  public  view  as  a  serious  rival  to  Turgot. 

Neither  the  prudence  of  Bertin  nor  the  protests  of 
Necker  could  at  all  hinder  Turgot  in  the  course  he  had 
resolved  upon.  He  determined  to  restore  corn  to  its 
former  freedom,  and  he  determined  also  to  effect  that 
restoration  under  conditions  of  signal  significance.  It 
might  be  possible  for  an  ingenious  speculator  to  trace 
back  to  Target's  action  in  this  instance  one  of  the  most 
potent  factors  in  the  great  revolutionary  problem.  Up 
to  this  time,  edicts  had  come  upon  the  people  of  France 
as  part  of  "  the  good  pleasure  "  of  the  king.  The  king, 
advised  by  his  ministers,  decided  that  such  and  such  a 
law  was  to  take  effect,  and  there  was  no  more  to  be  said 
about  it.  The  idea  of  in  any  way  explaining  to  the 
people  whom  these  laws  were  to  govern  why  these  laws 
were  made  never  entered  into  the  head  of  the  sovereign 
or  of  his  advisers.  Now  for  the  first  time  Turgot  took 
the  audacious  step  of  acting  in  a  precisely  contrary  man- 
ner. He  set  forth,  in  an  elaborate  preamble  to  the  edict, 
the  reasons  for  the  change  which  it  introduced.  The 
public  found,  to  its  astonishment  and  delight,  that  they 
had  to  do  with  a  minister  who,  when  laws  were  made, 
condescended  to  take  them  in  some  degree  into  his  confi- 
dence, and  to  explain  to  them  as  to  reasonable  human 


180  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cii.  X! 

beings  why  the  legislative  measures  which  bound  them 
were  enacted.  Well  might  Voltaire  exclaim  in  uncon- 
scious prophecy  after  reading  the  preamble  to  Turgot's 
edict,  "It  seems  as  if  new  heavens  and  a  new  earth  had 
made  their  appearance  !"  So  in  a  measure  they  had 
appeared,  or  were  about  to  appear,  far-seeing  Voltaire. 
That  same  preamble  must  have  had  a  powerful  effect 
in  accelerating  the  onward  sweep  of  the  Revolution. 
When  a  subordinated  people  once  find  that  their  gov- 
ernors think  it  worth  while  to  explain  to  them  why  they 
are  governed,  they  will  very  soon  begin  to  think  that 
the  time  has  come  for  them  to  take  a  share  in  their  own 
government.  When  Turgot  penned  that  edict  he  was 
unconsciously  countersigning  the  death-warrant  of  the 
Old  Order,  and  of  the  old  monarchy  of  France. 

Unluckily  for  Turgot  and  for  the  country,  his  reforms 
fell  upon  evil  times.  The  price  of  corn  rose  persistent- 
ly;  the  harvest  of  1774  was  poor;  it  threatened  to  be 
bad  indeed  in  1775.  Mysterious  discontent  smouldered. 
On  April  18,  1775,  a  little  flame  of  queer  insurrection 
burst  out  in  Dijon.  A  band  of  peasants  poured  into 
the  town,  sacking  mills  and  private  houses,  seeking  for 
corn  and  clamoring  for  the  life  of  the  governor,  who 
had  said,  or  was  reported  to  have  said,  that  if  the  people 
lacked  corn  they  might  eat  grass.  A  plucky  bishop's 
eloquence  finally  induced  the  marauders  to  leave  the 
town ;  they  disappeared  as  suddenly  as  they  came. 
The  earth  has  bubbles  as  the  water  has,  and  these  seemed 
to  be  of  them.  While  people  were  still  speculating  as 
to  the  meaning  of  the  odd  affair,  while  some  saw  in  it 
a  genuine  popular  rising  and  others  only  the  mechanical 
performance  of  a  prepared  and  well-financed  plot  got 
up  to  injure  Turgot,  the  rising  was  repeated  under  much 
more  ominous  conditions,  and  much  nearer  to  the  seat 


1775.  "REGUMQUE  TORRES."  181 

of  government.  What  is  known  in  history  as  the 
"  Guerre  des  farines "  suddenly  blazed  out  with  start- 
ling activity  in  the  very  neighborhood  of  Paris.  If  the 
Dijon  disturbance  had  been  lightning  in  a  clear  sky,  it 
was  mere  summer  lightning  compared  with  the  forked 
flashes  that  split  the  sky  at  Pontoise,  at  Versailles,  and 
at  Paris  itself. 

There  was  something  mysteriously  menacing  about 
these  rioters.  They  appeared  suddenly  in  bands  ;  it 
was  hard  to  find  out  whence  they  came  ;  they  were 
marshalled  by  fantastic  Callotesque  figures  of  bandit- 
like  aspect,  who  seemed  to  have  gold  coins  in  sufficient 
abundance  and  some  smack  of  military  skill.  Pontoise 
was  plundered,  startled,  turned  upside  down  by  the 
adventurous  rabble.  Next,  they  appeared  in  Versailles 
itself,  hard  by  the  very  throne  of  royalty.  They  had 
the  hardihood  to  push  their  way  into  the  courtyard  of 
the  royal  palace  and  clamor  for  bread  there.  Louis 
came  out  upon  his  balcony  to  address  the  mob,  but  the 
mob  would  not  listen  to  him.  Poor  Louis,  looking 
down  upon  that  sea  of  squalid  faces,  his  ears  dizzy  with 
that  turbulent  bawling  for  bread,  had  no  prophetic  vis- 
ion of  another  like  invasion  of  his  stately  palace,  like 
and  yet  far  more  terrible,  which  the  fates  had  in  store 
for  him  some  fourteen  years  later.  It  would  almost 
seem  as  if  the  preliminary  steps  of  the  Revolution  were 
being  carefully  rehearsed.  The  mob  had  found  its  way 
to  Versailles.  Hungry  proletaires  are  trying  their  'pren- 
tice hands  at  the  battlements  of  kings — "regumque 
turres." 

It  is  touching,  it  is  pathetic,  to  read  the  letters  which 
Louis  wrote  to  Turgot  in  this  time  of  excitement.  In 
one,  he  says,  "You  may  rely  on  my  firmness" — poor 
king,  who  never  was  sincerely  or  wisely  firm  in  his  life ; 


1 82  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL 

in  another  he  says,  "The  greatest  precautions  must  be 
taken  to  prevent  the  rioters  from  coming  to  lay  down 
their  conditions."  He  was  writing  of  the  public  mar- 
kets ;  he  little  thought  that  the  time  was  at  hand  when 
rioters  far  more  serious  were  coming  to  lay  down  their 
conditions,  and  when  no  precautions  would  prevent 
them. 

From  Versailles  the  riot  spread  to  Paris,  which  took 
fire  like  tinder  in  some  places.  Such  police  as  there 
were  crumpled  up  before  the  rioters,  who  had  every- 
thing their  own  way  for  a  time,  sacking  the  bakers' 
shops  and  carrying  off  the  bread.  But  if  the  rioters 
were  determined,  so  was  Turgot.  However  much  his 
influence  fostered  the  Revolution,  he  had  as  little  sym- 
pathy with  revolutionaries  as  the  stanchest  supporter 
of  the  Old  Order.  The  Parliament  and  Turgot  were 
at  odds  just  then,  and  between  the  Parliament  and  the 
riots  Turgot  had  his  hands  full.  But  he  was,  from  his 
point  of  view,  equal  to  the  situation.  He  posted  Paris 
with  placards  proclaiming  all  gatherings  under  pain  of 
death.  He  caused  Lenoir,  the  lieutenant  of  police  who 
had  let  the  riots  drift  on,  to  be  dismissed.  Two  armies 
were  raised  in  readiness  to  swoop  upon  Paris  at  a  mo- 
ment's notice.  In  the  face  of  these  vigorous  prepara- 
tions the  riot  collapsed,  evaporated.  There  were  a  few 
fights  in  the  country  districts,  there  was  a  scuffle  on  the 
Versailles  Road  in  which  about  a  score,  it  was  said,  of 
peasants  were  killed,  but  for  the  time  being  riot  was 
exorcised.  Timid  Parisians  peeping  out  of  their  houses 
to  peer  at  the  riot  found  that  it  had  vanished.  Two  of 
the  rioters  who  had  been  captured  were  hanged.  They 
went  to  the  gallows  declaring  that  they  were  dying  for 
the  people,  an  ominous  declaration  which  was  to  awaken 
ominous  echoes  later  on.  Those  two  gaunt,  poor  devils 


e.  TtiRGoT's  ENEMIES.  163 

can  scarcely  have  been  in  anybody's  pay.  Those  dying 
words  were  serious  to  them,  a  veritable  confession  of 
faith.  It  was  the  confession  of  a  political  creed  too ; 
those  two  poor  devils,  nameless  here  for  evermore,  were 
the  protomartyrs  of  the  French  Revolution.  To  them 
it  was  no  question  of  a  plot  stirred  up  by  Sartine  or  by 
Conti,  by  this  enemy  of  Turgot  or  that  enemy  of  Tur- 
got.  They  were  hungry,  and  their  fellows  were  hun- 
gry, and  so  they  died,  as  they  said,  for  the  people. 

The  immediate  result  of  the  riots  was  to  greatly 
strengthen  Turgot's  favor  with  the  king.  But  the  end 
was  drawing  near.  In  the  Parliament  of  Paris,  Turgot 
found  a  formidable  adversary.  He  had  strongly  op- 
posed the  proposal  to  obliterate  the  effects  of  the  Mau- 
peou  coup  diktat  and  restore  the  suppressed  parliaments 
to  their  old  position.  But  Maurepas  was  in  favor  of 
the  proposal,  Maurepas  planned  and  plotted,  and. Mau- 
repas carried  his  point,  to  the  despair  of  Condorcet,  who 
saw  in  the  return  to  the  old  form  of  parliaments  the 
revival  of  one  of  the  worst  systems  of  the  Old  Order. 
On  November  29,  1774,  Louis  solemnly  reinstated  the 
Paris  Parliament,  and  Turgot  found  himself  confronted 
by  a  body  solidly  and  stolidly  opposed  to  most  meas- 
ures of  reform. 

Turgot  had  enemies  enough  as  it  was.  The  clergy 
were  against  him  because  he  was  a  philosophy,  the  court 
was  against  him,  the  Paris  bourgeoisie  was  against  him, 
the  Choiseul  faction  was  against  him,  and  with  that 
faction  must  be  ranged  the  queen.  Marie  Antoinette 
was  against  Turgot  because  he  had  interfered  with  her 
use  of  the  bills  payable  at  sight,  which,  while  they  were 
the  delight  of  her  friends,  were  a  terrible,  uncontrol- 
lable drain  upon  the  treasury.  Marie  Antoinette  won 
De  Maurepas  away  from  Turgot ;  Turgot  was  almost 


184  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XI. 

alone.  He  had  the  king  with  him  still,  and  he  was  able 
to  induce  the  king  to  accept  his  famous  six  edicts,  and 
force  them  upon  a  furious  Parliament  in  a  bed  of  jus- 
tice on  March  12,  1776.  These  six  edicts  suppressed 
corvees,  suppressed  the  offices  concerning  the  wharves, 
markets,  and  ports  of  Paris,  suppressed  the  maUrises 
and  jurandes,  suppressed  the  Poissy  came,  and,  finally, 
modified  the  duty  on  tallow.  They  embodied  several 
of  the  most  needed  reforms,  but  they  were  not  destined 
to  do  France  much  service.  They  were  all  repealed 
after  Turgot's  fall,  and  when  the  great  waves  of  revo- 
lution came  washing  against  the  throne  they  carried  on 
their  crests  changes  compared  to  which  the  reforms  of 
Turgot  seem  well-nigh  insignificant. 

It  would  take  too  long  and  serve  no  purpose  to  go 
minutely  into  all  the  causes  that  led  to  Turgot's  down- 
fall. His  enemies  were  many  and  powerful ;  Marie  An- 
toinette was  actually  eager  to  have  him  sent  to  the 
Bastille ;  the  favor  of  the  king  was  daily  weakening. 
Louis  was  wearied  of  a  reforming  minister  who  was 
always  making  his  king  do  things  which  neither  the 
king's  queen  nor  the  king's  court  liked.  Turgot  felt 
that  his  hold  was  failing.  He  wrote  to  the  king  some 
blunt,  vigorous  letters,  setting  forth  his  position,  the 
king's  position,  and  the  position  of  the  country.  In 
one  of  these  letters  he  wrote  words  of  startling  pres- 
cience. "Do  not  forget,  sire,  that  it  was  weakness 
which  placed  the  head  of  Charles  I.  on  the  block."  It 
is  curious  how  again  and  again  the  fate  of  Charles  I. 
of  England  is  brought  warningly,  prophetically,  against 
Louis  XVI.  of  France.  Louis,  we  may  well  imagine, 
did  not  like  the  warning  ;  perhaps  his  weak  nature  was 
annoyed  at  being  told  of  its  weakness  ;  perhaps  to  his 
obstinate  mood  Turgot  seemed  a  kind  of  ambitious 


1776-81.  TtJRGOT'S  FALL.  185 

mayor  of  the  palace.  He  did  not  answer  Turgot's  let- 
ters, and  on  May  12th  Tujgot  was  formally  dismissed 
from  his  office.  There  was  a  shout  of  joy  from  all  the 
enemies,  there  was  a  wail  of  despair  from  all  the  friends 
of  reform.  "  I  see  nothing  but  death  before  me,"  Vol- 
taire wrote  to  La  Harpe,  "  since  M.  Turgot  is  no  longer 
in  office.  I  cannot  understand  how  the  king  can  have 
dismissed  him.  It  is  a  thunderbolt  which  has  struck 
both  my  brain  and  heart." 

Turgot  met  his  fall  with  dignity.  He  passed  his  five 
last  years  of  life  in  Paris,  devoted  to  literature,  to  poet- 
ry, and  to  science.  He  saw  much  of  Franklin  in  1776; 
in  1778,  when  Voltaire  came  to  Paris  for  the  triumph 
that  killed  him,  he  insisted  upon  seeing  Turgot,  and, 
seeing  him,  Voltaire  caught  Turgot's  hands  and  said, 
almost  weeping,  "  Allow  me  to  kiss  the  hand  which  has 
signed  the  salvation  of  the  people !"  These  touching 
and  noble  words  might  well  atone  for  the  criticism 
Voltaire  had  passed  unwittingly  upon  Turgot's  "^Eneid" 
translation.  On  March  18,  1781,  he  died  in  Paris,  and 
was  buried,  first  in  the  Church  of  the  Incurables,  in  the 
Rue  de  Sevres,  and  afterwards  in  the  cemetery  of  Bons, 
in  Xormandy.  His  grave  was  opened,  it  is  said,  in  1793, 
in  the  search  for  lead  for  ammunition,  when  his  body 
was  found  to  "be  in  perfect  preservation.  He  was  hur- 
riedly re-interred,  but  the  spot  is  not  now  known. 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XII. 


CHAPTER  XII. 

THE    DIAMOND    NECKLACE. 

HERE  let  us  for  a  moment  draw  breath  and  bridle  to 
deal  with  an  episode  which,  though  in  actual  date  it 
belongs  to  a  slightly  later  time,  is  in  itself  a  complete 
episode,  and  may  best  be  treated  of  by  itself  and  dis- 
posed of.  A  complete  episode  indeed,  a  little  dramatic 
episode  of  the  strangest,  most  foolish,  most  fantastic 
kind,  a  very  burlesque,  yet  fraught  with  the  most  mo- 
mentous issues  to  all  concerned.  Of  all  the  events  that 
gave  a  direct  helping  hand  to  the  progress  of  the  Rev- 
olution, none  was  more  potent  than  the  queer  crime  or 
collection  of  crimes  which  mankind  knows  by  the  name 
of  the  affair  of  the  Diamond  Necklace.  At  the  very 
moment  when  Beaumarchais  was  smiling  France's  aris- 
tocracy away,  came  this  grim  business  and  dealt  its 
murderous  strokes  at  the  Church,  the  nobility,  and  the 
very  throne  and  crown. 

There  are  some  historical  problems  which  appear  des- 
tined always  to  remain  mysteries.  Who  was  the  Man 
in  the  Iron  Mask?  Who  was  Homer?  Who  wrote, 
collected,  or  compiled  the  "  Arabian  Nights  "  ?  Who  was 
the  author  of  "  Junius"?  These,  and  a  score  of  simi- 
lar perplexities  that  leap  at  once  to  the  mind  will  prob- 
ably never  be  absolutely,  uncompromisingly,  definitely 
answered.  We  may  feel  morally  certain  that  Sir  Philip 
Francis  wrote  "  Junius,"  that  the  Man  in  the  Iron  Mask 
was  the  Italian  envoy  ;  that  the  "  Arabian  Nights  "  are 


1*774-86.-  HISTORIC   PROBLEMS.  IgV 

but  the  reproduction  of  a  lost  Persian  original ;  and 
that  the  "Iliad"  and  "  Odyssey  "  are  not  the  disjointed 
fragments  of  a  Wolfian  fanaticism.  But  we  cannot  sub- 
stitute in  any  of  these  instances  an  absolute  for  a  moral 
certainty.  The  doubt  still  may  linger,  must  linger,  can 
never  be  finally  swept  off  and  away.  The  story  of  the 
Diamond  Necklace  is  of  the  same  kindred.  It  is  prac- 
tically impossible  that  we  shall  ever  know  the  actual 
rights  and  wrongs  of  that  immortal  episode.  All  the 
facts,  such  as  they  are,  lie  before  us;  but  the  interpre- 
tation of  the  evidence  is  of  the  most  varying  kind.  On 
the  self-same  set  of  facts  one  student  will  build  up  one 
theory,  establish  to  his  own  satisfaction  and  the  satis- 
faction of  his  school  one  case  ;  only  to  be  demolished 
by  another  student,  who  on  no  other  or  newer  evidence 
builds  up  a  wholly  different  theory  and  establishes  a 
wholly  different  case. 

It  is,  it  must  be  confessed,  but  dreary  work  toiling 
through  all  the  voluminous  evidence  in  this  case  of  the 
Diamond  Necklace.  Whole  mountains  of  printed  pa- 
per have  been  piled  upon  it,  and  the  truth,  whatever  it 
may  be,  struggles  fitfully  beneath  the  mass  evident  only 
in  Enceladus  convulsions,  but  forever  invisible  to  human 
eye.  To  read  through  the  De  la  Motte  papers  alone, 
with  their  conflicting  chaos  of  improbabilities  and  im- 
possibilities, is  to  come  out  from  the  ordeal  with  a 
whirling  brain,  and  a  sensation  as  having  revolved  in  a 
whirlpool.  There  is  other  evidence  of  a  kind  which 
suggests  rather  the  cesspool  than  the  whirlpool,  stag- 
nant filth  of  a  sort  in  which  the  age  abounded.  All 
the  obscene  birds  of  literature  and  art,  all  the  lampoon- 
ers, ballad-mongers,  and  caricaturists  of  the  baser  sort 
swooped  down  upon  the  Diamond  Necklace.  Like  the 
eagles  in  the  story  of  Sindbad,  they  dived  from  on  high 


188  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XII. 

after  diamonds ;  like  Sindbad's  birds,  too,  they  were 
lured  not  by  the  diamonds,  but  by  the  flesh  the  diamonds 
clung  to.  The  luckless  student  who  has  to  glance  at 
these  things  holds  his  nose  as  he  goes  by  and  gasps  for 
the  free  air.  All  honor  to  the  true  caricaturists,  all 
honor  to  Pasquin  and  his  people  and  their  flying  shafts 
of  satire.  The  caricature  and  the  lampoon  have  done 
humanity  simple  service  time  and  again.  But  these 
horrors  have  no  more  to  do  with  satire  than  the  poisoned 
dagger  of  the  assassin  has  to  do  with  the  art  of  war. 

That  strain  of  Orientalism  which  animates  so  much 
of  the  last  century,  begotten  of  "  Mille  et  une  Nuits," 
"  Mille  et  un  Jours,"  "  Mille  et  un  Quarts  d'Heure,"  and 
kindred  fanciful  fictions,  troubled  the  blood  and  brain 
of  Louis  XV.  In  the  frenzy  of  his  adoration  of  Ma- 
dame du  Barry,  he  expressed  the  Aladdin-like  wish  that 
he  could  offer  her  a  palace  entirely  built  of  gold  and 
jewels.  But  even  the  most  reckless  of  monarchs  must 
sometimes  cure  his  whims.  There  was  no  chancellor  to 
raise  sums  for  such  a  purpose,  no  farmer -general  to 
open  a  Fortunatus's  purse  at  his  prince's  feet  for  such  a 
freak;  there  was  a  limit  to  possible  taxation  even  with 
the  desire  to  build  an  Aladdin's  palace  spurring  the  de- 
sire to  tax.  So  Madame  du  Barry  had  to  do  without 
her  palace  of  gold  and  jewels.  But  if  the  king  was 
balked  in  one  piece  of  generosity,  he  was  resolved  to 
make  up  for  it  in  another.  He  determined  that  the 
white  Du  Barry  neck  should  be  adorned  with  the  most 
magnificent  diamond  necklace  in  the  world.  Accord- 
ingly, Boehmer  and  Bassenge,  crown  jewellers,  then  or 
later  were  consulted,  were  commissioned  to  fashion  a 
necklace  worthy  of  such  a  king  and  such  a  mistress. 
But  if  Louis  had  Aladdin's  opulence  of  imagination,  he 
lacked  Aladdin's  lamp,  he  lacked  Aladdin's  ring.  When 


1774-80.  LOUIS   ALADDIN.  189 

the  widow's  son  of  Canton  desired  a  thing,  it  was  but 
wish  and  have ;  Louis  XV.  might  wish,  but  he  had  to 
wait  long  before  he  could  have,  had  to  wait  and  not 
have  after  all. 

Boehmer  and  Bassenge  had  no  such  store  of  jewels 
by  them  as  could  compose  the  commissioned  necklace. 
No  jeweller  in  Europe  could  boast  of  such  a  store  of 
the  shining  stones.  To  get  the  needful  number  together 
was  a  matter  of  time,  patience,  perseverance,  and,  above 
all,  money.  So  Boehmer  and  Bassenge,  flushed  with 
the  princely  patronage,  sent  messengers  to  all  parts  of 
the  world,  east  and  west  and  south  and  north,  with  the 
one  wrord  of  command,  "diamonds."  All  the  money 
they  could  beg  or  borrow  they  scraped  together  and 
spent  in  the  prudent  purchase  of  diamonds.  There  was 
excitement  in  the  Judengasse  of  every  capital  in  Eu- 
rope. Diamonds  came  to  the  light  of  day  in  all  sorts 
of  queer,  unexpected  places,  in  dim  back  shops  where 
bearded  Jews  lived  in  squalor  upon  the  ransoms  of  em- 
pires; the  New  World  was  not  left  unransacked;  from 
all  the  points  of  the  compass  diamonds  gravitated, 
shining  drops  into  the  glittering  ocean  of  stones  which 
Boehmer  and  Bassenge  were  to  work  up  into  the  match- 
less necklace.  It  was  worth  their  while  to  take  pains 
and  to  spend  borrowed  money,  to  drain  their  resources 
and  pledge  their  credit  to  the  hilt,  for  the  reward  of- 
fered was  as  princely  as  the  spirit  which  prompted  the 
commission.  Two  millions  of  livres — eighty  thousand 
pounds  sterling — was  the  sum  agreed  upon  between  the 
king  and  his  jewellers.  That  the  king  was  mortal,  that 
there  was  any  risk  whatever  in  the  transaction,  never 
seems  to  have  crossed  the  minds  of  the  jewellers.  They 
collected  their  diamonds,  plundering  the  earth,  and  set 
to  work  to  piece  them  together  with  a  will, 


190 


THE  FKENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XII. 


The  Diamond  Necklace  has  done  its  ominous  work 
and  vanished  forever.  No  monarch,  no  American  mill- 
ionaire could  hope  to  bring  together  again  those  stones 
which  Boehmer  and  Bassenge  for  the  first  and  last  time 
brought  together.  But  it  is  perfectly  possible  for  the 
curious  to  get  some  idea  of  what  the  Diamond  Neck- 
lace was  to  be  like.  The  original  drawing  made  for 
Boehmer  and  Bassenge  has  been  reproduced,  and  may 
awaken  in  the  imaginative  mind  some  notion  of  how 
the  necklace  would  have  glowed.  Any  one  may  see 
pictured  the  neck  circle  of  seventeen  stories  with  its 
triple  pendants,  and  its  triple  festoons  and  their  pen- 
dants, its  two  broad  bands  of  diamonds  to  meet  upon 
the  bosom  in  a  kind  of  central  sun,  and  diverge  again 
into  two  tassels,  and  its  other  bands,  one  on  each  side, 
also  tasselled.  But  it  does  not  make  a  very  brave  show 
in  black  and  white;  we  must  "  make  believe  very  hard  " 
in  order  to  imagine  the  gleam  and  glitter  and  splendor 
of  that  historic  cascade.  Yet  even  in  its  pictured  in- 
significance there  is  something  ominous.  That  Diamond 
Necklace  "is  as  terrible  as  the  woven  web  of  the  Fates. 
If  Boehmer  and  Bassenge,  living  in  an  age  of  occultism, 
had  been  touched  with  any  tincture  of  prophecy,  they 
must  have  trembled  at  their  task.  For  into  every  fes- 
toon and  string  and  band  of  that  magnificent  toy  the 
Revolution  was  woven.  There  was  not  a  stone  of  it 
from  the  first  to  the  last  which  was  not  the  symbol  of 
some  fair  or  noble  life  untimely  ended.  The  stones 
seem  red  with  blood.  If  ever  a  mere  human  trinket 
helped  to  make  a  bloody  revolution,  that  Diamond 
Necklace  was  the  toy. 

Suddenly,  in  the  midst  of  all  the  travail,  while  the 
cunning  craftsmen  were  linking  stone  with  stone  into 
all  imaginable  splendor,  the  unexpected  came  to  pass, 


1774-86.         TOUTING   THE   DIAMOND   NECKLACE.  191 

The  king  died.  Madame  du  Barry  vanished  from  the 
court  where  she  had  reigned  and  revelled.  There  was 
no  purchaser  for  the  necklace;  it  would  never  find  its 
way  to  the  Du  Barry  neck.  And,  in  the  meantime, 
here  were  Boehmer  and  Bassenge  plunged  up  to  their 
ears  and  over  them  in  debt,  with  every  penny  they  could 
muster  sunk  in  a  gorgeous  trinket  which  few  could 
dream  of  buying,  while  angry  creditors  were  clamoring 
for  their  due.  The  Diamond  Necklace,  conceived  in 
obedience  to  a  kind  of  fairy-tale  whim,  was  proving  as 
troublesome  to  its  luckless  possessors  as  many  a  fairy 
gift.  There  is  something  curiously  tantalizing  in  the 
picture  of  a  brace  of  jewellers  with  two  millions  worth 
of  diamonds  on  their  hands,  and  with  nothing  in  the  till 
to  meet  their  debts.  In  this  sore  extremity  it  occurred 
to  Boehmer  that  possibly  the  new  Queen  of  France 
might,  in  the  first  flood-tide  of  her  royalty,  like  to  buy 
the  necklace.  Boehmer  waited  upon  Marie  Antoinette, 
displayed  the  splendid  necklace,  pleaded  speciously,  and 
failed  hopelessly.  Marie  Antoinette  admired  the  neck- 
lace, but  she  refused  to  buy  it.  Boehmer  and  Bassenge 
were  at  their  wits'  ends  again.  They  consulted  together 
and  adopted  a  plan.  Bassenge  was  to  travel  over  Eu- 
rope tempting  royal  and  aristocratic  eyes  with  pictures 
of  the  necklace,  wooing  royal  and  aristocratic  ears  with 
its  pi'aises.  Never  was  so  splendid  a  necklace  touted 
for  before.  Boehmer  was  to  remain  at  home  and  do  his 
best  to  tempt  the  queen. 

Then  a  new  figure  came  into  the  business,  and  with 
him  the  imbroglio  began.  If  Lauzun  is  the  type  of  all 
that  was  worst  in  the  nobility,  the  Cardinal  Prince  de 
Rohan  is  the  type  of  all  that  was  worst  in  the  clergy. 
To  find  a  parallel  for  him  in  English  history  we  must 
look  to  that  mad  Bishop  of  Derry,  Lord  Harvey's 


!92  T1IE  FREXCII   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XII. 

brother,  Lord  Bristol's  son,  whose  insane  career  of  os- 
tentatious profligacy  is  one  of  the  most  curious  epi- 
sodes in  the  English  ecclesiastical  history  of  the  last 
century.  The  Cardinal  Prince  de  Rohan  was  every- 
thing that  a  servant  of  the  Church  ought  not  to  be,  and 
nothing  that  a  servant  of  the  Church  should  be.  Pro- 
foundly depraved,  even  for  an  age  of  profound  deprav- 
ity, cynical  to  excess  iu  an  age  of  cynicism,  lustful,  lux- 
urious, devoted  to  display,  to  splendor,  to  amours  of  all 
kinds,  he  would  have  been  more  at  home  in  the  court 
of  Nero,  or  at  the  table  of  Trimalcio,  than  in  the  service 
of  the  Church  of  Christ.  Such  characters  are  not  agree- 
able to  study.  They  are  surrounded  by  miasmatic  va- 
pors, pestilential,  deadly,  in  which  it  is  hard  to  breathe. 
There  are  vices  which  are  in  a  measure  redeemed  by 
some  strain  of  the  valiant ;  there  are  men  of  immoral 
life  who  yet  are  heroic  and  do  not  repel,  do  not  at  least 
sicken.  But  there  is  no  trace  of  the  hero  in  the  com- 
position of  the  Cardinal  de  Rohan.  He  is  not  indeed 
quite  the  worst,  most  abominable  figure  swimming  in 
the  cesspool  maelstrom  of  decaying  France.  Nature, 
fertile  in  resource  for  evil  as  for  good,  can  trump  her 
own  trick,  can  eclipse  an  abominable  De  Rohan  with  a 
more  abominable  De  Sade.  But  for  the  moment  De  Ro- 
han was  the  King  of  Fools. 

Louis  Rene  Edouard  de  Rohan  was  born  in  1734. 
In  1770,  when,  as  coadjutor,  he  received  Marie  Antoi- 
nette at  Strasburg  during  the  illness  of  his  uncle,  the 
Prince  Bishop  of  Strasburg,  he  was  in  his  thirty-sixth 
year.  Marie  Antoinette  seems  never  to  have  liked  him. 
She  found  in  him  "  more  of  the  soldier  than  the  coad- 
jutor." Her  mother,  Maria  Theresa,  cordially  disliked 
him  when,  in  1771,  he  came  to  Vienna  as  ambassador 
from  France.  In  Vienna,  he  lived  a  mad,  tempestuous, 


1734-1803.          ROHAN,  A  CARDINAL  OF  CRIME.  193 

foolish  life,  riotous,  squandering,  aimless,  desperately 
dissipated.  He  amused  the  emperor,  he  won  the  hearts 
of  any  number  of  women  ;  he  was  an  unfailing  irrita- 
tion to  the  shrewd  eyes  of  Maria  Theresa.  But  for  her 
unwillingness  to  offend  the  French  king  and  to  make 
her  daughter's  position  at  the  French  court  unpleasant, 
she  would  have  insisted  upon  his  recall.  After  two 
years  of  orgies  the  Rohan  embassy  came  to  an  end. 
He  was  understood  to  be  in  disgrace  when  Louis  XVI. 
mounted  the  throne,  but  his  high  station  and  the  in- 
fluence of  his  relatives  got  him  the  oifice  of  Grand  Al- 
moner in  1777,  and  in  1779,  by  the  death  of  his  uncle, 
he  became  Prince  Bishop  of  Strasburg.  Through  Stan- 
islas Poniatowski,  King  of  Poland,  he  got  the  Red  Hat 
and  the  great  revenues  of  the  Abbey  of  Saint  Vaast  to 
replenish  his  drained  exchequer.  The  Academy,  which 
had  steadfastly  shut  its  doors  against  Diderot,  welcomed 
him  among  the  immortals  ;  the  Sorbonne  chose  him 
for  its  master.  Seldom  was  more  worthless  flesh  more 
loaded  with  honors. 

The  Cardinal  de  Rohan  was  now  nearly  fifty,  with 
high  bald  forehead,  complexion  of  a  red  favor,  white 
hair,  a  tall,  stately,  ample  presence.  Wine  and  women 
had  sapped  his  strength  and  inflamed  his  temper,  which, 
though  suave  enough  when  the  cardinal  was  uncrossed, 
could  rise  to  a  pitch  of  fury  at  a  thwarted  whim.  Per- 
haps under  happy  conditions  this  scion  of  the  great 
house  of  De  Rohan  might  have  made  a  decent,  honor- 
able man,  and  lived  a  decent,  comely  life  ;  but  the  fates 
were  against  him ;  he  was  indeed  a  vessel  appointed 
unto  dishonor,  the  deepest  dishonor.  The  waning  beauty 
of  his  ravaged  body  only  makes  him  by  contrast  the 
more  detestable  and  more  pitiable.  An  evil  spirit  in 
an  evil  shell,  a  Quilp,  an  Olivier  le  Daim,  we  can  un- 
I.— 13 


194  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XII. 

derstand  and  accept  as  things  with  a  kind  of  natural 
fitness.  But  there  is  a  peculiar  horror,  not  without  a 
twist  of  hateful  humor,  in  an  evil  soul  lurking  behind 
a  fair  and  seemly  outside.  This  descendant  of  a  chiv- 
alrous house,  this  member  of  an  order  supposed  to  rep- 
resent all  the  old  high  chivalrous  feelings,  this  prince 
of  a  great *Church  which  taught  the  creed  of  Christ, 
who  yet  was  merely  an  abject  voluptuary,  stained  with 
the  meanest  sins,  capable  only  of  the  meanest  actions 
and  the  meanest  desires,  is  a  more  revolting  study  than 
some  abject  ignorant  murderer.  It  was  ripe  time  for 
a  revolution  when  the  two  great  estates,  the  nobility 
and  the  Church,  could  jointly  bear  such  rotten  fruit 
as  this. 

This  imbecile  profligate  committed  the  most  imbe- 
cile act  of  his  life  in  desiring  to  commit  the  most  profli- 
gate. He  seems  to  have  lost  the  horror  he  called  a 
heart  to  Marie  Antoinette,  and  to  have  mingled  up  in 
his  muddled  mind  a  desire  for  the  beautiful  woman 
with  a  crazy  ambition  to  play  the  dominant  part  of 
Mazarin  to  her  Anne  of  Austria.  The  desire  and  the 
ambition  were  both  rendered  difficult  by  the  fact  that 
the  queen  entertained  a  very  hearty,  reasonable,  and 
just  dislike  of  the  crapulous  cardinal.  When  the  new 
king  and  queen  mounted  the  throne,  Rohan  came  post- 
haste from  Vienna  to  pay  his  respects,  and  was  terribly 
snubbed  for  his  pains  by  king  and  queen.  And  in  this 
slighted,  snubbed  position  the  cardinal  shivered  for 
nigh  on  to  ten  years,  arid,  abject,  imbecile. 

In  his  imbecility  the  cardinal  got  mixed  up  with  the 
queerest  of  queer  people.  He  had  a  kind  of  genius  for 
attracting  to  his  silly  state  the  most  astonishing  adven- 
turers, and  he  now  linked  to  his  grotesque  fortunes  two 
of  the  most  audacious  impostors  that  ever  issued  from 


1756-91.  MADAME  DE  LA  MOTTE.  195 

the  world's  Court  of  Miracles.  One  was  a  woman  who 
claimed  to  be  a  Valois,  the  other  was  a  man  who  pre- 
tended to  be  a  prophet  and  almost  a  god.  Madame  de 
laMotte  professed  to  be  descended  in  direct  line  through 
the  Counts  of  Saint  Remy  from  one  of  the  illegitimate 
amours  of  Hcmri  II.  For  this  august  claim  the  State 
allowed  her  some  thirty  pounds  a  year.  She  had  been 
many  things,  had  made  many  uses  of  her  attractive  per- 
son. She  was  married  to  a  Count  de  la  Motte,  who  had 
served  in  the  Gendarmerie,  and  was  a  pretty  rascal  of 
his  hands.  In  her  3routh  and  poverty  she  had  been  pat- 
ronized by  the  Marchioness  de  Boulainvilliers.  She 
now  professed  to  be  in  the  confidence  of  Marie  Antoi- 
nette. On  the  strength  of  this  pretence  she  was  able 
to  sound  what  stops  she  pleased  on  the  vicious  vanity 
of  Rohan.  Madame  de  la  Motte  was  such  an  astonish- 
ing liar  that  no  statement  of  hers  is  now  in  the  least 
believable,  and  it  is  mirch  more  than  probable  that,  as 
Marie  Antoinette  herself  said,  the  queen  and  the  cour- 
tesan never  met  all.  But  De  Rohan  swallowed  anything. 
Madame  de  la  Motte  made  him  believe  that  Marie  An- 
toinette was  eager  for  a  reconciliation  ;  she  professed 
to  be  close  in  the  queen's  counsel ;  she  brought  him 
dainty  little  letters,  full  of  the  friendliest  import,  pur- 
porting to  come  from  the  queen's  own  royal  hand.  The 
letters  really  came  from  the  ruffian  hand  of  a  scoundrel 
named  Reteaux  de  Villette ;  but  in  the  mood  in  which 
he  then  was,  a  mood  of  a  crazy  passion  and  crazy  am- 
bition, the  cardinal  would  have  swallowed  any  imposi- 
tion, however  gross.  It  must  be  admitted  that  Madame 
de  la  Motte  handled  her  big  fish  with  considerable  dex- 
terity. She  pretended  to  take  back  the  cardinal's  let- 
ters to  the  queen,  those  letters  which  Beugnot  after- 
wards helped  Madame  de  la  Motte  to  destroy,  when 


196  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XII. 

arrest  was  in  the  air,  and  of  which  he  said  that  he  could 
imagine  no  man,  not  indeed  writing  them,  but  begin- 
ning to  read  them  and  then  going  on  with  the  task. 
She  invented  a  little  comedy  of  the  difficulty  the  queen 
had  to  encounter  in  bringing  the  cardinal  back  into  the 
full  sunlight  of  court  favor  ;  she  pretended  that  the 
queen  insisted  upon  patience  until  all  was  well.  And 
the  poor  cardinal  was  patient,  a  more  patient  gull  never 
lent  himself  to  the  rookers.  If  he  were  not  such  a  des- 
picable old  rogue  one  could  almost  have  the  heart  to 
pity  him,  he  was  so  ludicrously  bubbled.  How  stupidly 
eager  he  was  to  be  deceived  !  lie  allowed  himself  to 
believe  that  the  queen  actually  wrote  to  him  to  borrow 
money,  and  he  paid  the  money  over  of  course  to  the 
faithful  Dame  la  Motte,  who  lived  in  luxury  upon  it 
with  her  two  scoundrels,  her  husband  and  Reteaux  de 
Villette.  He  allowed  himself  to  believe  that  a  gesture 
of  the  head  made  by  the  queen  one  day,  at  Versailles, 
as  he  stood  by  and  watched  with  Dame  la  Motte,  was 
a  special  gesture  of  recognition  and  assurance  to  him, 
although  it  was  a  familiar  daily  gesture  of  the  queen's. 
He  allowed  himself  to  be  juggled  by  the  buffoon  scene 
of  the  bosquet,  in  which  Madame  de  la  Motte  played 
off  a  Demoiselle  Oliva  upon  the  amorous  cardinal  as 
the  Queen  of  France,  and  then  broke  up  the  interview 
before  it  could  be  prolonged  too  far,  leaving  the  car- 
dinal with  a  rose  in  his  hand  and  insane  hopes  in  his 
heart.  She  juggled  him  into  the  belief  that  he  was  to 
be  permitted  to  buy  the  necklace  for  the  queen.  But 
if  he  was  thus  pitiably  the  dupe  of  Madame  de  la  Motte, 
he  was  also  the  dupe  of  a  man  rogue  who  played  upon 
the  cardinal's  superstitions  as  Madame  de  la  Motte 
played  upon  his  passions. 


1784.       DE  ROIIAX'S  VICIOUSXESS  AND  SIMPLICITY,         197 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

COUNT     CAGLIOSTKO. 

IT  is  curious  to  think  that  a  man  of  the  world  like 
the  Cardinal  de  Rohan  should  have  been  so  lightly,  so 
easily  bamboozled  by  a  female  rogue  like  Madame  de 
la  Motte,  and  by  the  most  audacious  male  rogue  then 
strutting  his  way  through  Christendom.  It  points  at 
the  least  the  excellent  lesson  that  a  man  may  be  very 
vicious  indeed,  and  at  the  same  time  very  silly ;  that 
the  profoundest  depravity  has  no  armor  in  it  to  protect 
from  the  assaults  of  ingenious  knavery ;  that  the  mind 
of  the  most  cynical  old  sinner  is  as  easily  played  upon 
as  that  of  the  freshest  pigeon  yet  fluttering  to  be  plucked. 
That  the  cardinal  was  taken  in  by  Madame  de  la  Motte 
was  perhaps  not  so  surprising.  The  cardinal  was  in 
love,  or  what  he  called  in  love,  and  a  man  in  love  will 
believe  anything.  But  before  ever  Madame  de  la  Motte 
had  fluttered  a  single  one  of  her  forgeries  before  his 
foolish  eyes,  the  Cardinal  de  Rohan  had  fallen  into  the 
snares  of  an  adventurer  who  claimed  for  himself,  with 
an  unconquerable  coolness  in  addressing  a  prince  of  the 
Church,  attributes  that  were  no  less  than  divine. 

The  passion  for  the  occult  is  always  with  us.  The 
pupils  of  the  occult  try  to  peep  under  the  veil,  as  the 
Persian  poets  call  it,  just  as  idle,  cimous  children  at  the 
fair  try  to  peep  under  the  canvas  of  the  players'  tent  to 
catch  some  furtive  glimpse  of  the  ardently  desired  per- 
formance. Occultism  can  never  wholly  fade  from  hii- 


198  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XIII. 

man  fancy  ;  nay,  more,  it  would  even  appear  to  increase 
rather  than  to  dwindle  with  civilization  or  with  certain 
phases  of  civilization.  The  more  sceptical  an  age  is, 
the  more  proud  of  its  far-reaching  philosophies  and  its 
derring-do  of  thought,  the  more  men  turn  from  the  chill 
glitter  of  science  to  the  warm  half-tints  of  occultism. 
The  hanky-panky  of  the  gypsy  on  the  green,  the  tricks  of 
fortune-telling  cards,  the  crystal  ball,  the  lines  on  the 
hand,  and  the  look  of  the  face,  and  the  solemn  prophe- 
cies of  the  stars,  all  find  higher  votaries  than  clowns 
and  bumpkins  when  Philosophy  is  clamoring  her  loud- 
est that  she,  and  she  alone,  has  the  touchstone  of  truth. 
It  was  part  of  the  inevitable,  unalterable  law  of  human 
action  and  reaction,  that  the  age  and  the  society  which 
had  been  attracted  by  Rousseau  and  D'Holbach,  Grimm 
and  Diderot,  and  D'Alembert  should  also  have  been  at- 
tracted by  a  semi-quack  like  Mesmer  and  a  whole- 
hearted rogue  and  adventurer  like  Cagliostro. 

Mesmer,  whose  name,  like  that  of  Guillotin,  is  like  to 
outlast  Caesar's,  was  born  in  1734  in  Germany — accord- 
ing to  some  at  Vienna,  according  to  others  at  Weiler, 
according  to  others  still  at  Merseburg.  In  1766  he  was 
received  as  medical  doctor  by  the  Faculty  of  Vienna. 
The  subject  of  his  thesis  was  "The  Influence  of  the 
Planets  upon  the  Human  Body."  From  the  fact  that 
the  planets  acted  one  upon  another,  and  that  the  sun 
and  moon  acted  upon  our  atmosphere  and  our  seas,  lie 
concluded  that  these  great  bodies  acted  also  upon  ani- 
mated bodies,  and  especially  upon  the  nervous  system, 
by  means  of  a  subtle,  all-penetrating  fluid.  And  even 
as  under  this  influence  there  existed  in  the  sea  an  ebb 
and  flow,  so  also  in  animated  bodies  he  believed  that  he 
discerned  a  tension  and  relaxation — veritable  tides,  as  it 
were.  This  subtle  fluid,  the  general  agent  of  all  these 


1734-78.  MESMKIJ.  199 

changes,  much  resembled  the  loadstone  in  its  proper- 
ties. He  called  it  in  consequence  Animal  Magnetism. 

From  Jesuit  astronomical  professor  Hell,  with  his 
cures  by  magnetized  iron,  from  strange  Swiss  cleric 
Gassner,  with  his  mysterious  exorcisms  of  Satan  as 
cure  for  diabolical  maladies,  Mesmer  gained  a  greater 
belief  than  ever  in  his  animal  magnetism,  and  began  to 
try  the  working  of  cures  on  his  own  account  in  Vienna. 
But  it  was  the  old  business  of  the  prophet  and  his  own 
country.  Mesmer's  cures  were  doubted,  derided,  got 
him  into  serious  trouble  with  angry  fathers  menacing 
the  magnetic  master  with  drawn  swords.  At  last  the 
empress  bade  Mesmer  "cease  his  fooleries."  Mesmer 
took  the  hint.  Anticipating  Rabagas,  he  decided  that 
there  was  a  world  elsewhere,  and  that  world  France. 
France,  of  course,  meant  Paris,  and  to  Paris  Mesmer 
came  in  the  February  of  1778,  and  set  in  his  staff. 

In  Paris  Mesmer  soon  became  the  hero  of  the  hour. 
The  cynical,  sceptical  Encyclopaedic  world  was  amaz- 
ingly attracted  by  the  occult.  Was  not  Illuminatism 
spreading  in  all  directions  ?  Were  not  the  subtle  forces 
of  Freemasonry,  if  they  combated  the  authority  of  the 
Church,  opposed  to  rationalism  and  atheism  as  well  ? 
Were  not  people  wild  in  their  worship  of  Lavater,  who 
read  man's  mission  in  his  face?  Did  not  they  even  ac- 
cord a  kind  of  sneering  credulity  to  the  assertions  of 
the  Count  de  Saint-Germain,  whom  Choiseul  affected  to 
patronize?  Did  they  not  believe  in  the  Philosopher's 
Stone,  in  the  Elixir  of  Life,  in  Heaven  knows  what  else 
besides,  from  the  Squaring  of  the  Circle  to  Perpetual  Mo- 
tion ?  The  good  old  Greek  alchemists,  Zosimus,  Aga- 
thodemon,  Agatharchides,  and  their  kind,  would  have 
found  plenty  of  fellowship,  plenty  of  followers  in  the 
obscurer  streets  of  Paris  in  the  days  immediately  sue- 


200  THE  FHENTCH  REVOLt'TIOtf.  Cu.  XIII. 

ceeding  the  rationalistic  and  scientific  triumphs  of  the 
"  Encyclopaedia." 

It  is  not  surprising  that  the  age  which  gave  such  a 
welcome  to  Mesmer  should  have  given  a  kindred  wel- 
come to  a  far  more  audacious  impostor.  The  name  of 
Cagliostro  is  writ  large  upon  the  records  of  rascaldom 
of  all  time.  Lucian's  fantastic  Peregrinus  was  a  joke 
to  him.  If  the  hour  brings  the  man,  then  Cagliostro 
was  the  very  man  for  that  particular  hour.  The  hour 
of  quickening  science  and  quickening  superstitions,  of 
Freemasonry  and  Illuminati,  of  Weishaupt  and  of  Ca- 
zotte,  of  the  Montgolfiers  and  of  Saint-Martin,  of  Ba- 
beuf  and  of  Mesmer,  of  the  Puysegurs  and  of  Lava- 
ter,  was  the  very  hour  for  a  Cagliostro  to  shine  in,  who 
blended  in  his  own  person  pretensions  to  science,  to  oc- 
cultism, to  illuminatism.  The  soil  of  Paris  was  fat  just 
then  for  such  a  rank  weed  to  flourish  in. 

In  the  autumn  of  the  year  1781  Cagliostro  was  as- 
tonishing the  good  people  of  Strasburg  as  much  by  his 
singular  conduct  as  by  the  extraordinary  cures  he  was 
represented  to  have  performed.  According  to  the 
Abbe  Georgel,  Rohan's  old  friend  and  jackal,  the  car- 
dinal, curious  to  behold  so  remarkable  a  personage, 
went  to  Strasburg,  but  found  it  necessary  to  use  inter- 
est to  get  admitted  into  the  presence  of  the  illustrious 
charlatan.  "If  monseigneur  the  cardinal  is  sick,"  said 
he,  "  let  him  come  to  me  and  I  will  cure  him."  If  he  is 
well,  he  has  no  business  with  me  nor  I  with  him."  This 
reply,  far  from  offending  the  cardinal's  vanity,  seems 
only  to  have  increased  his  desire  to  become  acquainted 
with  the  great  medicine- man.  When  the  cardinal 
gained  admission  to  the  sanctuary,  he  fancied,  or  Geor- 
gel thinks  he  fancied,  that  he  saw  impressed  on  the 
countenance  of  this  mysterious  individual  a  dignity 


1780-88.  ACHARAT.  201 

which  impressed  him  with  an  almost  religious  awe,  and 
the  very  first  words  he  uttered  were  inspired  by  rever- 
ence. The  brief  interview  excited  more  strongly  than 
ever  in  the  mind  of  the  cardinal  the  desire  for  a  more 
intimate  acquaintance.  This  gradually  came  about,  the 
crafty  Cagliostro  timing  his  conduct  and  his  advances 
so  skilfully  that,  without  seeming  to  desire  it,  he  gained 
De  Rohan's  entire  confidence,  and  won  the  ascendency 
of  the  strong  mind  over  the  weak. 

During  the  next  two  years  or  so  Cagliostro  seems  to 
have  lived  largely  at  De  Rohan's  palace  at  Saverne,  jug- 
gling the  cardinal,  when  he  happened  to  be  there,  with 
experiments  in  his  laboratory,  and  making,  as  the  cred- 
ulous cardinal  maintained,  not  only  gold,  but  diamonds, 
under  his  very  eyes.  In  the  cardinal's  absence  the 
count  would  indulge  in  carousals,  prolonged  far  into  the 
night,  with  the  Baron  de  Planta,  the  cardinal's  equerry, 
for  companion,  and  pour  into  Planta's  ears  the  aston- 
ishing romance  which  he  called  his  life.  Mr.  Vizetelly, 
in  his  interesting  account  of  the  famous  swindle,  sets 
forth  at  length  Cagliostro's  romantic  record  of  himself. 
He  professed  ignorance  of  the  place  of  his  birth,  but 
told  a  cock-and-bull  stoiy  of  his  childhood  in  Medina, 
where  he  went  by  the  name  of  Acharat,  and  lived  at- 
tended by  servants  in  a  style  of  great  splendor  in  apart- 
ments in  the  palace  of  the  Mufti  Salahayn,  the  chief 
of  the  Mussulmans.  From  Medina  he  said  that  he  was 
taken  when  quite  a  youth  to  Mecca,  where  he  was 
adopted  by  the  Scheriff.  Three  years  later  he  was  car- 
ried to  Egypt,  visited  the  chief  cities  of  Africa  and 
Asia,  and  eventually  found  himself  in  Malta,  where  a 
legend  of  a  grand-master  and  of  a  princess  of  Trebizond 
was  evolved,  and  where  he  assumed  the  name  of  Cagli- 
ostro and  the  title  of  count.  From  Malta  he  journeyed 


202  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIII. 

to  Sicily  and  Naples,  thence  to  Rome,  where  he  made 
the  acquaintance  of  several  cardinals,  and  was  admit- 
ted to  frequent  audiences  of  the  pope.  He  professed 
to  have  next  visited  Spain,  Portugal,  Holland,  Russia, 
and  Poland,  and  gave  a  list  of  the  nobles  of  those 
countries  with  whom  he  had  become  acquainted.  At 
length,  in  September,  1780,  he  appeared  in  Strasburg, 
where  his  fame  as  a  physician  had  already  preceded 
him.  There,  as  he  asserted  with  perfect  truth,  he 
tended  the  poor  generally,  and  particularly  sick  sol- 
diers and  prisoners,  without  fee  or  reward.  Strasburg 
was  quickly  crowded  with  strangers,  who  came  either 
to  see  him  or  to  consult  him.  He  soon  made  the  ac- 
quaintance of  the  Cardinal  De  Rohan,  whom  he  ac- 
companied to  Paris  to  prescribe  for  the  Prince  de  Sou- 
bise,  suffering  at  the  time  from  an  accident  to  his  leg. 
After  a  short  stay  in  the  capital  he  returned  to  Stras- 
burg, where  he  seems  to  have  complained  of  persecution. 
It  seems  certain  that  letters  were  written  to  the  authori- 
ties in  his  behalf  by  the  Count  de  Vergennes,  minister 
for  foreign  affairs,  the  Marquis  de  Miromenil,  keeper  of 
the  seals,  and  the  Marquis  de  Segur,  minister  of  war, 
desiring  that  every  protection  should  be  afforded  to  the 
friend  of  Abraham. 

It  is  almost  needless  to  say  that  Cagliostro's  story 
about  his  residence  in  Medina  and  Mecca,  and  Egypt, 
Rhodes,  and  Malta  was  a  tissue  of  impudent  lies.  We 
know  that  his  real  name  was  Giuseppe  Balsamo,  that  he 
was  the  son  of  a  small  tradesman  of  Palermo  in  Sicily, 
where  he  was  born  in  1 743.  The  family  were  of  Jew- 
ish origin.  Goethe  will  visit  them  in  later  years.  In 
his  early  youth  Giuseppe  belonged  to  the  religious  order 
of  Benfratelli.  As  he  grew  older  he  became  remark- 
able for  his  esurience,  his  cunning,  his  zeal  for  medi- 


1743.  GIUSEPPE  BALSAMO.  203 

cine,  his  audacity.  When  the  Benfratelli  would  have 
no  more  to  do  with  him,  he  took  with  a  light  heart  and 
a  light  hand  to  swindling.  When  one  of  his  frauds 
was  discovered  he  fled  to  Catalonia.  There  he  married 
a  young  and  pretty  girl,  Lorenza  Feliciana,  with  whom 
he  drifted  to  Rome.  After  conf erring  on  himself  the 

O 

title  of  Prince  Pellegrini,  he  had  the  audacity  to  return 
to  Palermo  under  his  assumed  name.  There  a  genuine 
prince  became  infatuated  with  Donna  Lorenza,  and  took 
her  husband  under  his  powerful  protection.  The  false 
Pellegrini,  however,  was  soon  recognized  as  the  escaped 
swindler  and  arrested.  But  on  the  day  appointed  for 
his  examination,  his  friend,  the  true  prince,  forced  the 
doors  of  the  tribunal,  assaulted  the  counsel  for  the 
prosecution,  and  overwhelmed  the  president  with  re- 
proaches. In  consequence  the  terrified  court  set  the 
prisoner  at  liberty.  Cagliostro,  leaving  his  wife  in  the 
care  of  the  prince,  again  started  on  his  travels,  in  the 
course  of  which  he  visited  many  of  the  chief  cities  of 
the  Continent.  He  was  picked  up,  it  is  commonly  as- 
serted, while  still  a  young  man — being  little  over  thirty 
years  of  age — by  the  sect  of  Illuminati.  They  thought, 
and  correctly  thought,  that  they  had  discovered  in  him 
a  willing  and  able  instrument  for  the  dissemination  of 
their  doctrines.  Who  that  loves  romance  does  not  re- 
member that  wonderful  scene  in  a  cave  some  little 
distance  from  imperial  Worms,  where  the  Cagliostro  of 
Dumas  learns  the  objects  of  the  society  of  which  he 
was  now  a  meniber.  The  Illuminati  were  to  overturn 
the  thrones  of  Europe.  The  first  blow  was  to  be  struck 
in  France.  After  the  fall  of  the  French  monarchy  it 
was  proposed  to  attack  Rome.  The  society  was  said  to 
have  countless  followers.  It  was  said  to  possess  enor- 
mous funds,  the  proceeds  of  the  annual  subscriptions  of 


204  TUB  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIII. 

its  members,  dispersed  among  the  banks  of  Amsterdam, 
Rotterdam,  Basle,  Lyons,  London,  Venice,  and  Genoa.  It 
was  said  that  a  considerable  sum  of  money  was  placed 
at  Cagliostro's  disposal,  to  enable  him  to  propagate  the 
doctrines  of  the  sect  in  France.  This  was  the  origin  of 
his  first  visit  to  Strasburg  in  the  autumn  of  the  year 
1780,  when  he  adopted  for  his  device  the  letters  L.  P.  D., 
signifying  "Lilia  pedibus  destrue" — Trample  the  lilies 
underfoot.  . 

Was  there  ever  such  a  magnificently  audacious  sham 
and  scoundrel  in  the  world  before  as  this  Sicilian  rap- 
scallion, who  pretended  to  have  been  present  at  the 
wedding  of  Cana  and  to  have  learned  the  secret  which 
slaves  wish  to  Oriental  princes,  of  living  forever?  But 
if  he  laid  claim  to  many  gifts,  he  had  some  acquire- 
ments. He  had  studied  medicine,  if  he  preferred  alche- 
my. He  knew  something  of  what  may  be  called  natu- 
ral magic.  His  juggleries  were  so  cleverly  contrived 
that  many  visitors  of  the  highest  rank  and  the  utmost 
intellectual  attainments  considered  them  to  be  marvel- 
lous. The  general  public  exalted  his  every  act  until  it 
touched  the  supernatural.  He  asked  no  price  for  his 
public  exhibitions.  He  pretended  to  consider  himself 
insulted  by  any  one  who  offered  him  gold.  His  hand 
was  constantly  open  to  the  poor.  He  visited  them  in 
their  homes.  He  gave  them  medicine;  he  gave  them 
alms.  It  was  only  natural  that  this  ingenious  system 
of  self-advertisement  proved  successful.  People  began 
to  talk  of  the  mysterious  stranger,  the  wise  and  gener- 
ous physician  who  passed  his  time  with  the  lowly  of 
the  earth  and  seemed  indifferent  to  its  great  ones.  The 
great  ones  whom  Cagliostro  affected  to  disregard  were 
piqued  by  indifference  into  curiosity.  Soon  many  of 
them  became  enthusiastic  disciples  and  admirers  of  the 


1780.  THE   ARCH-QUACK.  205 

physician-philosopher.  Among  these,  none  believed  in 
him  so  implicitly  as  the  Cardinal  Prince  de  Rohan,  who, 
spite  of  the  count's  "  perfect  quack  face,"  seems  to  have 
worshipped  him  as  a  being  something  more  than  human. 
We  are  told  that  in  one  of  the  salons  of  the  Palais- 
Cardinal  there  was  a  marble  bust  of  Cagliostro,  with  a 
Latin  inscription  on  the  pedestal  hailing  him  as  God  of 
the  Earth. 

According  to  the  Abbe  Georgel,  Rohan  consulted 
Cagliostro  about  the  necklace  business  before  conclud- 
ing the  negotiations.  The  abbe  describes  how  the  Py- 
thon mounted  his  tripod.  He  tells  how  the  Egyptian 
invocations  were  made  at  night  in  the  cardinal's  own 
salon,  illuminated  by  an  immense  number  of  wax  tapers. 
The  oracle  spoke  under  the  inspiration  of  its  diemon. 
The  negotiation  was  worthy  of  the  prince.  It  would 
be  crowned  with  success.  It  would  raise  the  goodness 
of  the  queen  to  its  height.  It  would  bring  to  light 
that  happy  day  which  would  unfold  the  rare  talents  of 
the  cardinal  for  the  benefit  of  France  and  of  the  human 
race.  After  this  it  is  scarcely  surprising  to  hear  that 
the  Countess  de  la  Motte,  who  h'ad  formei'ly  met  Cag- 
liostro at  Strasburg,  had  1'enewed  her  acquaintance  with 
him  in  the  salons  of  the  Palais-Cardinal.  The  De  la 
Mottes  and  Cagliostro  were  close  neighbors.  He  lived 
at  the  Hotel  de  Chavigny,  in  the  Rue  Saint -Claude, 
quite  near  at  hand.  The  house  which  he  occupied,  ac- 
cording to  Louis  Blanc,  the  house  which  was  afterwards 
the  residence  of  Barras,  was  one  of  the  most  sumptuous 
in  Paris.  It  was  decorated  with  Oriental  luxury.  Its 
rooms  were  always  brilliant  with  the  gleam  of  subtle 
lights.  Within  them  Cagliostro  professed  the  pursuits 
of  the  philosopher  and  planned  the  juggleries  of  the 
quack.  The  bust  of  Hippocrates  was  a  conspicuous  orna- 


206  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XIII. 

merit.  So  was  a  black  frame  which  enshrined  in  letters 
of  gold  a  literal  translation  of  Pope's  "Universal  Prayer." 

Many  very  different  persons  have  placed  on  record 
their  opinions  of  Cagliostro  or  of  his  performances. 
The  words  of  three  of  them  are  especially  interesting. 
One  was  a  woman,  the  Baroness  d'Oberkirche.  One 
was  Jacques  Claude  de  Beugnot,  then  a  young  man  of 
a  little  over  twenty,  with  no  thought  of  the  kingdom  of 
Westphalia  in  his  head.  One  was  Abraham  Joseph 
Benard-Fleury,  the  popular  actor.  The  testimony  of 
each  may  well  be  cited  anew  against  our  king  of  quacks. 
The  Baroness  d'Oberkirche  describes  Cagliostro  in  her 
"Memoirs"  as  anything  but  handsome.  Still  she  ad- 
mits that  she  had  never  seen  a  more  remarkable  physi- 
ognomy, and  that  he  had  a  penetrating  look  which 
seemed  almost  supernatural.  She  tries  to  describe  the 
expression  of  his  eyes,  that  expression  at  once  fire  and 
ice,  which  attracted  and  repelled  at  the  same  time, 
which  made  people  afraid  and  yet  inspired  them  with 
an  irrepressible  curiosity.  One  might,  she  says,  draw 
two  different  portraits  of  him,  both  resembling  him,  and 
yet  totally  dissimilar.  Woman-like,  she  was  much  im- 
pressed with  the  diamonds  which  he  wore  on  his  shirt- 
front,  on  his  watch-chain,  and  on  his  fingers.  They  were 
diamonds  of  large  size,  and  apparently  of  the  purest 
water — diamonds  which,  if  they  were  not  paste,  were 
worth  a  king's  ransom,  diamonds  which  he  pretended 
that  he  had  made  himself. 

The  baroness  met  Cagliostro  at  a  dinner  at  De  Ro- 
han's. Though  there  were  several  guests  at  dinner,  the 
cardinal  occupied  himself  almost  exclusively  with  the 
baroness,  using  all  his  eloquence  to  bring  her  over  to 
his  way  of  thinking  with  regard  to  Cagliostro.  much  to 
the  good  baroness's  amazement.  The  baroness  declares 


1780-88.  THE   NEW   PYTHON.  207 

that  had  she  not  heard  him  with  her  own  ears,  she  could 
never  have  believed  that  a  prince  of  the  Church,  a  Ro- 
han, an  intelligent  and  honorable  man  in  so  many  re- 
spects, could  have  allowed  himself  to  be  brought  to  the 
point  of  abjuring  both  his  dignity  and  his  free  will  at 
the  bidding  of  a  scheming  adventurer. 

There  is  hardly  a  more  curious  scene  in  history  than 
this  scene  between  the  infatuated  prince  and  the  shrewd, 
observant  woman  of  the  world,  whose  keen  eyes  study 
with  astonishment  that  poor  deluded  spirit  in  that  poor 
degraded  body.  It  is  one  of  the  most  valuable  of  side- 
lights, for  it  shows  at  once  the  extraordinary  weakness 
of  the  cardinal  and  the  extraordinary  power  of  Cagli- 
ostro.  De  Rohan  seems  to  have  been  pathetically  anx- 
ious to  convince  the  baroness  of  the  gifts  of  his  wizard. 
The  baroness  seems  to  have  been  tranquilly  sceptical. 
The  cardinal  showed  her  a  large  diamond  which  he  had 
on  his  little  finger,  a  ring  worth  a  little  fortune.  With 
a  kind  of  infantile  enthusiasm  he  declared  that  Cagli- 
ostro  had  made  it,  had  created  it  out  of  nothing.  He 
declared  that  he  was  present,  with  his  eyes  fixed  upon 
the  crucible,  and  had  assisted  at  the  deed.  De  Rohan 
having  lauded  the  Cagliostro  who  made  diamonds,  went 
on  to  praise  the  Cagliostro  who  made  gold.  He  de- 
clared that  Cagliostro  had  made  in  his  presence,  in  his 
crucibles,  five  or  six  thousand  francs'  worth  of  the  pre- 
cious metal,  and  had  promised  to  make  De  Rohan  the 
richest  prince  in  Europe.  These  were  not  dreams  to 
De  Rohan,  these  were  certainties.  He  raved  about 
prophecies  fulfilled.  He  raved  about  miraculous  cures 
performed.  He  vowed  that  Cagliostro  was  not  only 
an  extraordinary  but  a  sublime  man.  His  goodness  had 
never  been  equalled.  The  charities  he  bestowed,  and 
the  benefits  he  conferred,  passed  all  imagination. 


208  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XIII. 

The  astonished  baroness  asked  the  cardinal  if  he  had 
given  Cagliostro  nothing  for  all  this — had  not  made 
him  the  smallest  advance,  had  made  him  no  promise, 
given  him  no  written  document  which  might  compro- 
mise De  Rohan?  The  absurd,  unhappy  prince  assured 
her  that  Cagliostro  had  asked  nothing,  had  received 
nothing  from  him.  Then  the  baroness,  losing  patience, 
became  prophetic.  In  a  fine  sibyllic  vein  she  warned 
De  Rohan  that  Cagliostro  must  reckon  on  obtaining 
from  the  cardinal  many  dangerous  sacrifices,  since  he 
bought  his  unbounded  confidence  so  dearly.  She  urged 
him  to  be  extremely  cautious,  lest  one  of  these  days 
Cagliostro  should  lead  him  too  far.  The  cardinal  only 
answered  by  an  incredulous  smile.  But  the  sibyl  felt 
certain  that  later,  at  the  time  of  the  Necklace  affair, 
when  Cagliostro  and  the  Countess  de  la  Motte  had  cast 
De  Rohan  to  the  bottom  of  the  abyss,  he  recalled  her 
words  and  was  scarcely  comforted. 

Young  Beugnot  met  Cagliostro  at  one  of  Madame  de 
la  Motte's  little  suppers.  It  was  a  remarkable  supper- 
party.  It  included  Father  Loth,  minime  of  the  Place 
Royale,  who  reconciled  his  sacred  functions  with  the 
place  of  second  secretary  to  Madame  de  la  Motte.  He 
used  to  say  mass  for  her  on  Sundays,  and  charged  him- 
self during  the  rest  of  the  week  with  commissions  at 
the  Palais-Cardinal  which  the  first  secretary  thought 
beneath  his  dignity.  It  included  also  the  Chevalier  de 
Montbreul.  He  was  a  veteran  of  the  green-rooms.  He 
was  still  a  good  conversationalist.  He  was  prepared  to 
affirm  almost  any  mortal  thing.  He  was  found,  as  if 
by  chance,  wherever  Cagliostro  appeared,  ready  to  bear 
witness  to  the  marvels  he  had  performed.  He  offered 
himself  as  a  positive  example  miraculously  cured  of  any 
number  of  diseases,  of  which  the  names  alone  were 
amazing  and  alarming. 


1780-88.  BEUGNOT   SPEAKS.  209 

Curious  young  Beugnot  made  the  most  of  his  oppor- 
tunity. He  sat  facing  Cagliostro.  He  made  a  point 
of  examining  by  stealth.  He  confesses  that  he  did  not 
know  what  to  think  of  him.  The  face,  the  style  of 
dressing  the  hair,  the  whole  of  the  man,  impressed  him 
in  spite  of  himself.  He  was  of  medium  height,  and 
rather  stout.  He  had  a  very  short  neck,  a  round  face 
ornamented  with  two  large  eyes  sunken  in  his  head, 
and  a  broad  turn-up  nose.  His  complexion  was  of  an 
olive  tinge.  His  mode  of  wearing  his  hair  seemed  new 
in  France.  It  was  divided  into  several  little  tresses, 
which,  uniting  at  the  back  of  the  head,  were  tied  up  in 
the  form  known  as  the  "  club."  He  wore  a  French-cut 
coat  of  iron  gray  embroidered  with  gold  lace,  with  his 
sword  stuck  in  the  skirts,  a  scarlet  vest  trimmed  with 
lace,  red  breeches,  and  a  hat  edged  with  a  white  feather. 
This  last  article  of  dress  was  still  dear  to  the  mounte- 
banks and  queer  medical  adventurers  who  haunted  fairs 
and  sold  their  drugs  out-of-doors.  Cagliostro's  splen- 
dor was  heightened  by  lace  ruffles,  several  costly  rings, 
and  shoe-buckles  that  were  quite  brilliant  enough  to 
pass  for  very  fine  diamonds. 

Cagliostro  seems  to  have  spoken  a  kind  of  jargon, 
half  Italian,  half  French,  plentifully  interlarded  with 
quotations  in  an  unknown  tongue,  which  passed  with 
the  unlearned  for  Arabic.  He  had  all  the  talking  to 
himself,  and  found  time  to  go  over  at  least  twenty  dif- 
ferent subjects  in  the  course  of  the  evening,  simply  be- 
cause he  gave  to  them  merely  that  extent  of  develop- 
ment which  seemed  good  to  him.  Every  moment  he  was 
inquiring  if  he  was  understood,  whereupon  everybody 
bowed  in  turn  to  assure  him  that  he  was.  When  start- 
ing a  subject  he  seemed  like  one  transported,  raised  his 
voice  to  the  highest  pitch  and  indulged  in  the  most  ex- 
L— 14 


210  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIII. 

travagant  gesticulations.  The  subjects  of  his  discourse 
were  the  heavens,  the  stars,  the  grand  arcanum,  Mem- 
phis, transcendental  chemistry,  giants,  and  the  extinct 
monsters  of  the  animal  kingdom.  He  spoke,  moreover, 
of  a  city  in  the  interior  of  Africa  ten  times  as  large  as 
Paris,  where  he  pretended  that  he  had  correspondents. 
What  a  "supper  of  the  gods  "  that  must  have  been! 

The  actor  Fleury,  in  his  memoirs,  gives  an  account  of 
another  curious  meeting,  when  the  Grand  Kophta  pro- 
fessed to  call  up  the  spirit  of  D'Alembert.  It  is  too  fan- 
tastically characteristic  not  to  be  worth  re-living  for  the 
moment.  The  spectators,  or,  as  Cagliostro  preferred  to 
call  them,  guests,  sat  in  arm-chairs  along  the  wall  on 
the  east  side  of  the  room.  Before  these  chairs  an  iron 
chain  was  stretched,  lest  some  foolish  person  should  be 
impelled  by  curiosity  to  rush  upon  destruction.  On  the 
other  side  was  placed  the  chair  intended  for  the  recep- 
tion of  the  spirit.  The  Grand  Kophta — the  name  as- 
sumed by  Cagliostro  on  such  occasions— chose  the  un- 
usual hour  of  3  A.M.  for  his  evocations.  Shortly  before 
that  time  a  voice  was  heard  to  order  the  removal  from 
the  scene  of  cats,  dogs,  horses,  birds,  and  all  reptiles, 
should  any  be  near.  Then  came  a  command  that  none 
but  free  men  should  remain  in  the  apartment.  The  ser- 
vants were  accordingly  dismissed.  A  deep  silence  fol- 
lowed, and  the  lights  were  suddenly  extinguished.  The 
same  voice,  now  assuming  a  louder  and  more  authorita- 
tive tone,  requested  the  guests  to  shake  the  iron  chain. 
They  obeyed.  An  indescribable  thrill  ran  through  their 
frames.  The  clock  at  length  struck  three — slowly,  and 
with  a  prolonged  vibration  of  the  bell.  At  each  stroke 
a  flash,  as  sudden  and  transitory  as  lightning,  illumined 
the  apartment,  and  the  words  "  Philosophy,"  "  Nature," 
and  "  Truth  "  successively  appeared  in  legible  charac- 


1780-88.  THE   GRAND   KOPIITA.  211 

ters  above  the  empty  arm-chair.  The  last  word  was 
more  brilliant  than  the  others.  The  lights  were  sud- 
denly rekindled  ;  how,  no  one  could  tell.  Stifled  cries 
were  heard,  like  those  of  a  man  whose  mouth  was  gagged 
or  a  man  struggling  to  break  loose  from  persons  restrain- 
ing him.  Then  Cagliostro  appeared. 

The  Grand  Kophta  wore  a  costume  which  seems  to 
have  been  a  blend  of  the  Moslem  and  the  mountebank. 
Flowing  drapery  set  off  his  figure  to  advantage,  and  the 
glow  of  enthusiasm  in  his  face  made  him  look  really 
handsome.  He  delivered  a  short  address,  commenting 
on  the  words  just  seen  over  the  chair.  Then,  turning 
to  the  four  cardinal  points,  he  uttered  some  cabalistic 
words,  which  returned  as  if  from  a  distant  echo.  The 
lights  being  again  extinguished,  he  commanded  the 
guests  again  to  shake  the  chain,  and  as  they  did  so 
the  strange  feeling  was  renewed.  The  outline  of  the 
arm-chair  now  became  gradually  perceptible  in  the 
darkness,  as  though  the  lines  had  been  traced  on  a  black 
ground  with  phosphorus.  The  next  moment,  and  as  if 
by  the  same  process,  a  winding -sheet  could  be  seen, 
with  two  fleshless  hands  resting  upon  the  arm  of  the 
chair.  The  winding-sheet,  slowly  opening,  discovered 
an  emaciated  form.  A  short  breathing  was  heard,  and 
two  brilliant,  piercing  eyes  were  fixed  upon  the  specta- 
tors. This  buffoonery  was  supposed  to  show  that  the 
illustrious  philosopher,  the  author  of  the  Preface  to  the 
"Encyclopaedia,"  had  been  called  from  the  dead.  He 
would  answer  questions  put  to  him,  but  Cagliostro  alone 
was  privileged  to  hear  him  speak.  The  spirit  was  asked 
if  it  had  seen  the  other  world.  The  simulacrum  of  D'Al- 
embert,  answering  through  the  lips  of  rogue  Cagliostro, 
said, "  There  is  no  other  world."  A  witty  commentator 
upon  this  answer  declared  that  the  questioner  should 


212  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIII. 

have  said,  "  Illustrious  D'Alembert,  if  there  is  no  other 
world,  where  may  you  happen  to  come  from  now  ?" 

If  Cagliostro  permitted  himself  fooleries  of  this  kind, 
his  purposes  were  not  all  foolery.  Freemasonry  had 
grown  and  thriven  since  the  Derwentwater  days,  and 
Cagliostro  had  not  been  slow  to  avail  himself  of  the 
influence  it  could  lend  to  his  professions.  Whether  he 
was  initiated  in  an  obscure  lodge  in  London  chiefly 
given  over  to  hairdressers  and  pastrycooks  or  not,  mat- 
ters little.  He  was  initiated  somehow,  somewhere,  and 
drifted  about  the  Continent  founding  mysterious  Egyp- 
tian lodges,  and  calling  himself  the  Grand  Kophta. 
Adam  Weishaupt,  professor  of  canonic  law  at  the  Uni- 
versity of  Ingoldstadt,  had  conceived  the  idea  of  mak- 
ing the  range  and  aim  of  Freemasonry  much  wider;  of 
forming  a  vast  occult  association  which  should  strike 
down  all  tyranny,  all  superstition,  all  injustice.  Such 
was  Illuminism,  with  its  areopagites,  its  preparations, 
its  mysteries,  as  it  issued  from  the  brain  of  the  German 
schemer  of  eight-and-twenty,  in  the  year  1776.  Illu- 
minism spread  rapidly.  To  further  its  aims,  Adam 
Weishaupt,  who  remained  its  secret  head,  was  ready 
to  use  all  means  and  all  instruments.  Cagliostro  and 
he  came  together  at  Frankfort-on-the-Main,  the  depu- 
ties of  Illuminism,  and  it  was  decided  that  Cagliostro 
should  be  initiated.  Weishaupt  had  always  professed 
contempt  for  the  Alchemists  and  the  Rosicrucians,  of 
whom  Cagliostro  was  so  remarkable  a  representative. 
But  Cagliostro  was  thought  to  be  a  useful  man  to  enrol 
in  the  ranks  of  Illuminism,  and  enrolled  he  accordingly 
was,  as  we  have  seen.  We  have  seen  that  he  was  given 
money,  and  sent  to  spread  the  light  at  Strasburg.  We 
have  seen  how  he  came  upon  the  Cardinal  de  Rohan, 
and  soon  immeshed  him  in  the  toils  of  his  fantastic  oc- 


1780-88.  QUACK,   KNAVE,  SCOUNDREL.  213 

cultism.  How  far  in  thus  enslaving  Rohan,  in  helping 
to  spin  the  conspiracy-web  of  the  Diamond  Necklace, 
he  was  obeying  the  orders  of  a  superior  tribunal  and 
playing  a  planned  part  in  a  scheme  of  revolution,  it  is 
impossible  even  to  guess.  If  we  have  given  so  much 
space  to  so  poor  a  rogue,  it  is  because  he  filled  in  his 
time  a  great  space  in  the  public  mind.  It  is  not  the 
best  men  who  are  the  most  admired,  the  wisest  who  are 
the  most  honored,  and  Cagliostro,  quack,  knave,  scoun- 
drel though  he  was,  occupies  a  place  in  the  picture  of 
his  day,  and  demands  in  the  picture  of  the  historian  an 
attention  quite  out  of  proportion  to  his  merits,  but  not 
out  of  proportion  to  his  fantastic  influence.  In  the  long 
records  of  rascaldom,  from  Peregrinus  to  Bamfylde 
Moore  Carew,  from  the  master-thief  who  robbed  Rhamp- 
sinitus  to  Jonathan  Wild,  no  single  rascal  stands  for- 
ward with  such  magnificent  effrontery,  such  majestic 
impudence,  such  astonishing  success,  as  Cagliostro.  His 
is  the  very  garland  of  roguery,  and  his  memory  thrusts 
itself  upon  the  attention  of  the  chronicler  as  unblush- 
ingly  as  the  living  swindler  thrust  himself  upon  the  age 
in  which  he  lived.  The  epoch  of  Cagliostro  preceded 
the  epoch  of  Dr.  Guillotin. 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION,  CH.  XIV. 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

KNAVES    AND     FOOLS. 

MADAME  DE  LA  MOTTE  was  resolved  to  have  the  neck- 
lace. It  certainly  showed  magnificent  audacity  in  the 
woman  to  dream  of  carrying  off  this  glory  of  jewellery, 
which  had  been  designed  for  the  mistress  of  a  king, 
and  which  had  been  offered  in  vain  in  all  the  courts  of 
Europe.  She  made  the  cardinal  believe  that  Marie  An- 
toinette would  accept  the  cardinal's  services  in  the  pur- 
chase of  the  necklace;  Cagliostro,  consulted  by  the  car- 
dinal, advised  him  to  go  on.  He  said  that  good  would 
come  of  it.  The  cardinal  went  on.  The  jewellers  were 
deceived  by  a  forged  autograph  of  the  queen,  agreeing 
to  their  terms,  and  signed,  absurdly,  "Marie  Antoinette 
de  France,"  an  inaccuracy  which,  in  the  excitement  of 
the  moment,  impressed  neither  the  amorous  cardinal 
nor  the  impatient  Boehmer.  The  cardinal,  concealed  at 
Madame  de  la  Motte's  house,  saw  the  casket  containing 
the  jewels  given  over  to,  as  he  imagined,  an  emissary 
for  the  queen,  who  was  really  only  Reteaux  de  Villette 
again  in  disguise.  For  a  while  all  went  well.  The  car- 
dinal was  supremely  happy.  Madame  de  la  Motte  rolled 
in  money  and  lived  sumptuously,  while  her  husband  and 
Villette,  having  pulled  the  necklace  to  pieces,  carried 
the  shining  stars  abroad  to  sell  them  at  London  and 
at  Amsterdam.  Suddenly  the  crash  came.  Boehmer 
learned  by  chance  from  Madame  Campan,  the  queen's 
woman,  that  the  queen  never  had  the  necklace.  Before 


1785.  A   DRAMATIC   SCENE.  215 

the  story  could  get  abroad,  Louis  XVI.  precipitated 
matters  by  summoning  the  cardinal  to  Versailles  and 
having  him.  arrested.  De  Rohan  had  just  time  to  send 
a  servant  off  to  ride  post-baste  to  the  Palais-Cardinal, 
leap  off  his  foundering  horse,  rush  to  faithful  jackal 
Georgel,  and  have  all  the  letters  professing  to  come 
from  the  queen  destroyed  before  the  emissaries  of  the 
law  could  arrive  to  seize  the  cardinal's  papers.  Madame 
de  la  Motte  was  equally  fortunate  in  being  able  to  de- 
stroy the  cardinal's  letters  before  they  could  be  seized. 
Madame  de  la  Motte  was  at  Clairvaux,  dining  with  the 
abbot,  Dom  Rocourt,  one  of  the  handsomest  and  the 
stupidest  men  in  France,  and  a  very  great  admirer  of 
Madame  de  la  Motte.  Beugnot  was  there,  and  we  owe 
to  him  a  most  dramatic  scene.  Supper  was  kept  wait- 
ing for  the  arrival  from  Paris  of  the  Abbe  Maury,  after- 
wards destined  to  be  famous  enough.  We  shall  meet 
with  him  again.  He  was  late,  but  at  last  he  arrived, 
and  was  at  once  asked  if  there  was  any  news  in  Paris. 

The  Abbe  Maury  first  professed  surprise  at  their  ig- 
norance. Then  came  his  astounding  piece  of  news,  the 
news  which  had  astonished  and  bewildered  all  Paris. 
The  Cardinal  de  Rohan,  Grand  Almoner  of  France,  had 
been  arrested  on  August  15,  the  festival  of  the  Assump- 
tion, in  his  cardinal's  attire,  as  he  was  leaving  the  king's 
cabinet.  People,  it  seemed,  talked  of  a  diamond  neck- 
lace which  he  was  to  have  bought  for  the  queen,  but 
which  he  did  not  buy  at  all.  Was  it  not  inconceivable, 
Maury  asked,  plaintively,  of  his  amazed  listeners,  tbat 
for  such  a  trifle  as  this  a  grand  almoner  of  France  should 
have  been  arrested  in  his  ecclesiastical  vestments  and  on 
quitting  the  royal  presence  ? 

Here  was  news  with  a  vengeance.  Beugnot  glanced 
at  Madame  de  la  Motte,  whose  self-possession  seemed  to 


210  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIV. 

have  deserted  her.  Her  napkin  had  fallen  from  her 
hand,  and  her  pale  and  rigid  face  seemed  as  if  it  Avere 
immovably  fixed  above  her  plate.  After  the  first  shock 
was  over  she  made  an  effort  and  rushed  out  of  the 
room.  In  the  course  of  a  few  minutes  Beugnot  left  the 
table  and  joined  her,  and  they  at  once  drove  to  Paris. 
On  the  road  Beugnot  frequently  urged  Madame  de  la 
Motte  to  fly.  He  was  a  close  friend  of  hers,  as  he  was 
of  many  strange  folk  in  his  time,  and  he  could  give 
good  counsel.  But  she  refused  to  fly,  declaring  that  she 
had  nothing  to  do  with  any  necklace  affair,  and  that  it 
must  all  be  some  trick  devised  by  Cagliostro. 

It  must  have  been  a  queer  drive.  As  they  entered 
Paris  Beugnot  again  entreated  her  to  at  least  burn  any 
papers  which  might  compromise  her  or  the  cardinal. 
This,  at  least,  was  a  measure  dictated  by  honor  on  the 
one  side  and  by  prudence  on  the  other.  She  con- 
sented. Beugnot  offered  to  assist  her,  and,  as  she  did 
not  refuse,  the  much  -  devoted  but  still  more  curious 
Beugnot  accompanied  her  to  her  room.  Her  husband, 
who  had  left  home  early  in  the  morning  to  join  a  hunt- 
ing-party, had  not  yet  returned.  The  pair  opened  a  large 
chest  of  sandal-wood,  filled  with  papers  of  all  colors  and 
dimensions.  Being  naturally  anxious  to  make  quick 
work  of  the  matter,  Beugnot  inquired  if  there  were 
among  them  any  bills  of  exchange,  bonds,  bank-notes,  or 
drafts  ;  and,  on  receiving  an  answer  in  the  negative,  he 
proposed  to  throw  the  entire  heap  into  the  fire.  But  Ma- 
dame de  la  Motte  insisted  on  at  least  a  cursory  examina- 
tion being  made  of  them.  The  examination  proceeded 
very  slowly  on  her  part,  very  precipitately  on  his.  Beug- 
not declares  that  he  saw  hundreds  of  letters  from  the 
Cardinal  de  Rohan.  He  noted  with  pity  the  ravages 
which  the  delirium  of  love,  aided  by  that  of  ambition, 


1785.  BURNING  LA   MOTTE'S   LETTERS.  217 

had  wrought  in  the  mind  of  this  unhappy  man.  It  is 
fortunate  for  the  cardinal's  memory  that  these  letters 
were  destroyed,  but  it  is  a  loss  for  the  history  of  hu- 
man passions.  Probably  the  whole  wide  literature  of 
amatory  epistles,  from  those  attributed  to  Menander  to 
those  written  by  Keats,  from  the  letters  of  Camilla  Pi- 
sana  to  the  letters  of  Miss  J.,  can  boast  no  stranger  col- 
lection of  documents  than  those  which  the  infatuated 
Cardinal  de  Rohan  wrote,  which  Madame  de  la  Motte 
had  garnered,  and  which  Beugnot  helped  to  burn. 

Among  these  motley  papers  there  were  invoices, 
offers  of  estates  for  sale,  prospectuses,  and  advertise- 
ments of  new  inventions.  Some  of  the  letters  were 
from  Boehmer  and  Bassenge,  and  made  mention  of  the 
necklace,  spoke  of  terms  expired,  acknowledged  the 
receipt  of  certain  sums,  and  asked  for  larger  ones. 
Beugnot  asked  Madame  de  la  Motte  what  should  be 
done  with  them.  Finding  her  hesitate,  he  took  the 
shortest  course,  and  threw  them  all  into  the  fire.  The 
affair  occupied  a  considerable  time.  When  it  was  over 
Beugnot  took  his  leave  of  Madame  de  la  Motte,  urg- 
ing her  more  strongly  than  ever  to  depart.  She  only 
answered  by  promising  to  go  to  bed  immediately.  He 
left  her  in  an  atmosphere  poisoned  by  the  odor  arising 
f  roi-  burning  paper  and  wax,  impregnated  with  twenty 
different  perfumes — fit  atmosphere  for  the  incantations 
of  such  a  witch  as  she  !  This  was  three  o'clock  in  the 
morning.  At  four  o'clock  she  was  arrested,  and  at  half- 
past  four  was  on  her  way  to  the  Bastille.  She  would 
have  done  better  in  taking  Beugnot's  advice. 

The  rest  of  the  gang  were  soon  arrested — Caglios- 
tro,  his  wife,  the  fair  Feliciani,  Reteaux  de  Villette, 
Courtesan  Oliva.  All  Paris  was  wild  with  excitement. 
The  air  was  dark  with  the  showers  of  memorials  is- 


218  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XIV. 

sued  by  the  different  defendants.  All  the  Rohan  in- 
terest, all  the  high  nobility  and  high  clergy,  were  rabid 
at  the  imprisonment  of  a  noble  and  a  prince  of  the 
Church.  To  make  bad  worse  for  himself,  Louis  gave 
the  case  into  the  hands  of  the  Paris  Parliament. 

The  whole  business  of  the  necklace  is  queer.  No  one 
will  ever  now  get  to  the  bottom*  of  it.  The  cardinal 
certainly  negotiated  for  it.  Marie  Antoinette,  who  bad 
refused  it  from  Louis  once  and  again,  seems  certainly 
to  have,  not  unnaturally  in  her  woman's  way,  coveted 
the  glittering  toy.  De  Rohan  seems  certainly  to  have 
believed  that  the  queen  would  be  willing  to  have  it,  and 
not  unwilling  to  have  it  from  his  hands.  The  hostile 
story — the  story  which  Louis  Blanc  believed — is  that 
the  queen  longed  for  the  diamonds,  used  the  cardinal 
and  Madame  de  la  Motte  for  her  intermediaries,  and 
bought,  or  wished  to  buy,  the  necklace  by  instalments. 
It  would  be  useless  to  go  through  the  terrible  intricacies 
of  the  most  astonishing  scandal  in  the  world.  There 
was  that  wonderful  sham  interview  between  the  queen 
and  De  Rohan  at  night  in  the  Versailles  garden  ;  there 
was  that  wonderful  sham  signature,  "Marie  Antoinette 
de  France."  About  these  points  the  curious  thing  is 
that  the  queen's  party  asserted  a  sham  in  each  case,  and 
that  Madame  de  la  Motte  admitted  the  sham,  but  in- 
sisted that  the  queen  was  a  party  to  the  absurd  impo- 
sition. The  admirers  of  Marie  Antoinette  see,  and  will 
still  see,  in  her  a  deeply  injured  victim.  Her  enemies 
see,  and  will  still  see,  a  designing,  avid,  and  unscrupu- 
lous woman.  Every  one  must  choose  between  the  two 
alternatives.  It  is  simply  impossible  to  decide. 

The  bewildering,  maddening  nine  months'  trial,  with 
its  multiplicity  of  witnesses,  its  wealth  of  mendacity, 
its  well-nigh  incredible  exposure  of  roguery  and  credu- 


1785-86.  THE   NIXE  MONTHS'  TRIAL.  219 

lity,  ended  in  the  acquittal  of  the  cardinal  and  the  ac- 
quittal of  Cagliostro.  But  if  the  Parliament  acquitted 
the  cardinal  and  Cagliostro,  Louis  did  not  acquit  them. 
They  were  both  ordered  into  exile.  For  the  others  the 
trial  ended  in  the  condemnation  to  the  galleys  for  life 
of  the  man  Villette,  who  confessed  to  forging  the 
queen's  signature ;  the  condemnation  of  Madame  de  la 
Motte,  who  was  to  be  whipped,  branded,  and  impris- 
oned for  life.  The  Countess  de  Sabran,  in  one  of  those 
letters  to  the  Chevalier  de  Boufflers  which  are  among 
the  most  charming  examples  of  last-century  correspond- 
ence, gives  a  long  account  of  the  punishment  of  Ma- 
dame de  la  Motte,  which  took  place  at  six  o'clock  in 
the  morning,  in  order  to  avoid  too  great  a  concourse  of 
curious  people.  The  unfortunate  woman  was  sleeping 
profoundly  when  they  came  to  tell  her  that  her  lawyer 
was  waiting  to  talk  with  her  about  her  affairs.  They 
had  adopted  this  course  the  more  easily  to  effect  their 
object.  She  got  up,  not  fearing  anything,  put  on  a 
small  petticoat  and  a  cloak,  and  descended  quickly  to 
the  room,  where  she  beheld  eight  men  and  M.  Le  Bre- 
ton, the  registrar,  who  held  her  sentence  in  his  hand. 
At  this  sight  she  was  much  agitated,  and  tried  to  fly  ; 
whereupon  they  threw  themselves  upon  her,  and  tied 
the  little,  delicate  hands,  which  her  admirers  had  called 
charming,  and  which  were  certainly  very  dexterous. 
Madame  de  la  Motte  boldly  asked  why  they  took  such 
precautions.  "  I  shall  not  escape  you  ;  if  you  were 
executioners  you  could  not  treat  me  worse."  She  be- 
lieved that  it  was  only  a  question  of  placing  her  in  a 
convent  for  a  few  years.  They  told  her  to  go  down  on 
her  knees,  and,  as  she  was  not  inclined  to  do  so,  one  of 
the  executioners  gave  her  a  sharp  blow,  which  brought 
her  to  the  ground.  M.  Le  Breton  then  read  her  sen- 


220  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIV. 

tence.  When  she  heard  that  she  was  going  to  be 
whipped  and  branded,  she  went  into  convulsions  and 
into  a  fearful  fit  of  passion,  biting  everything  that  was 
near  her,  tearing  her  clothes,  and  pulling  out  her  hair. 
In  spite  of  this  the  executioners  seized  her  and  car- 
ried her  to  the  place  of  punishment.  There  they  put 
the  rope  round  her  neck,  and  tried  to  undress  her  ;  but 
she  defended  herself  like  a  lioness,  with  feet,  hands, 
and  teeth,  and  so  obstinately  that  they  were  obliged  to 
cut  her  clothes  and  even  her  chemise  in  order  to  make 
an  end  of  the  affair ;  "  which,"  says  Madame  de  Sabran, 
demurely,  "  was  very  indecent,  as,  in  spite  of  the  unrea- 
sonable hour  which  had  been  chosen  with  the  object  of 
keeping  people  away,  spectators  were  present  in  very 
great  numbers."  The  poor  wretch  uttered  loud  cries, 
always  saying,  "  Spare  the  blood  of  the  Valois  !"  She 
hurled  forth  curses  against  the  Parliament,  the  cardinal, 
and  the  queen  she  had  wronged.  She  struggled  so  vio- 
lently that  the  executioner  could  not  perform  the  op- 
eration of  branding  her  as  perfectly  as  he  wished,  and 
scored  her  all  down  the  back.  After  the  infliction  of 
this  stern  punishment,  they  conveyed  her  in  a  hack- 
ney coach  to  the  Salpetriere.  Soon  after,  however,  in 
the  most  mysterious,  incomprehensible  manner,  she  es- 
caped from  the  Salpetriere  and  joined  her  husband,  who 
had  been  condemned  to  the  galleys  in  his  absence  in 
London. 

One  is  anxious  to  get  away  from  this  affair  of  the  col- 
lar. It  is  horrible,  haunting  ;  the  truth  is  not  in  it.  It 
is  like  a  sick  vision,  fantastic  as  some  picture  dream  by 
Callot,  some  fiction  dream  by  Hoffmann,  in  which  queens 
and  cardinals,  false  prophets  and  prostitutes,  join  in  a 
mad  devil's  medley  of  the  most  unmeaning  kind.  It 
was  not  to  be  understood  then  ;  it  is  not  to  be  under- 


1791.  THE   LAST   OF   LA   MOTTE.  221 

stood  now.  The  stanch  partisans  of  Marie  Antoinette 
may  think  her  all  innocent ;  her  enemies  may  think  her 
all  guilty — there  is  evidence  or  lack  of  evidence  either 
way.  One  thing  is  certain :  the  affair  of  the  necklace 
struck  a  cruel  blow  at  the  tottering  monarchy.  The 
queen  never  recovered  from  the  scandal.  Cagliostro, 
for  whom  St.  Angelo  waits — Cagliostro,  with  his  buf- 
foon babble  of  Medina  and  Acharat,  and  Althotas  and 
all  his  machinery  of  burlesque  prophet ;  Madame  de  la 
Motte,  with  her  branded  bosom  and  blistering  tongue  ; 
forger  Villette  and  fools  Boehmer  and  Bassenge  ;  amo- 
rous, infamous  cardinal,  and  light-hearted  light-o'-love 
Oliva,  among  them  managed  to  leave  a  terrible  stain 
upon  the  fair  name  and  fair  fame  of  Marie  Antoinette. 
Whether  Marie  Antoinette  were  innocent  or  guilty  is 
really,  in  this  regard,  of  no  moment  to  us  now.  What 
is  of  moment  is  that  the  scandal  of  the  Diamond  Neck- 
lace attached  an  association  of  shame  to  her  name,  and 
that  the  blunderings  of  De  Rohan,  and  the  plunderings 
of  Madame  de  la  Motte,  if  they  failed  in  all  else,  suc- 
ceeded in  this — in  shaking  the  monarchy.  Let  us  ac- 
cept that  fact  as  self-evident,  and  get  out  again  into  the 
clear  air. 

But  before  we  pass  from  the  horror  of  the  story, 
let  us  see  what  fate  fell  upon  the  principal  actors  in 
the  queer  business.  Cagliostro,  after  beating  about 
the  world  and  living  in  all  manner  of  places — Sloane 
Street,  Knightsbridge,  being  one  of  them — at  last  was 
run  to  earth  in  Rome,  imprisoned  in  the  Castle  of  St. 
Angelo,  and  there,  for  all  his  cunning,  the  Grand  Kophta 
died.  Madame  de  la  Motte  ended  her  evil  life  in  Lon- 
don, after  publishing  a  vast  amount  of  infamy,  by  leap- 
ing out  from  a  window  to  escape  some  creditors  whom 
she  seemed  to  think  were  in  reality  determined  to  kid- 


222  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIV. 

nap  her.  The  countess,  according  to  the  La  Motte 
memoirs,  had  persuaded  herself  that  a  plot  was  on  foot 
to  carry  her  off  to  France,  and  there  imprison  her 
again.  She  seems  to  have  been  driven  almost  insane 
by  this  terror.  When  her  creditors  succeeded  in  break- 
ing in  her  door,  the  wretched  woman  dropped  out  of 
her  window,  and  fell  with  violence  upon  the  pavement. 
It  was  her  misfortune  not  to  be  killed  on  the  spot ;  she 
was  terribly  injured,  terribly  mutilated.  In  this  state 
she  lived  for  several  weeks,  and  at  last  died,  at  the  age 
of  thirty-four.  "  Her  whole  life,"  the  memoirs  observe 
sententiously,  "  was  one  long  career  of  misery  ;  but  it 
might  have  ended  happily  had  not  the  privilege  of  her 
birth,  by  over-exalting  her  imagination,  developed  be- 
yond measure  those  sentiments  of  pride  and  ambition 
which  conducted  her  to  her  fall." 

It  really  would  seem  as  if  a  relentless  destiny  were 
pursuing  every  one  of  the  knaves  and  the  fools,  the 
dupers  and  the  duped,  who  were  mixed  up  in  the  mys- 
tery of  the  Diamond  Necklace.  They  all  came  to  a  bad 
end,  the  big  rogues  and  the  little  rogues,  the  big  fools 
and  the  little  fools.  If  the  Diamond  Necklace  had  con- 
tained some  such  stone  as  those  we  hear  of  in  Oriental 
legend  which  entail  a  curse  upon  such  as  come  into  con- 
tact with  them,  it  could  not  have  been  more  ominous  of 
disaster  to  all  who  had  anything  to  do  with  it.  De- 
moiselle d'Oliva  married  a  scoundrel  named  Beausire, 
and  is  said  to  have  died  miserably  in  1789.  The  scoun- 
drel Beausire  played  his  base  part  of  spy  and  feeder  of 
the  guillotine  till  his  turn  came.  Fouquier  Tinville  did 
not  like  him,  it  was  said,  and  the  guillotine  had  him  and 
rid  the  world  of  him.  Boehmer  and  Bassenge,  luckless 
court  jewellers,  became  bankrupt. 

As  for  the  wicked,  foolish  cardinal,  his  end  of  life 


1803.  THE   LAST  OF  CARDINAL  DE   ROHAN.  223 

was  better  than  the  bulk  of  it  had  been.  Soon  after 
the  great  national  ceremony  in  the  Champ  de  Mars,  De 
Rohan  was  ordered  by  the  Assembly  to  resume  his  func- 
tions as  deputy  within  fifteen  days.  Instead  of  obey- 
ing, he  wrote  saying  that,  as  it  was  impossible  for  him 
to  give  his  allegiance  to  the  new  civil  constitution  of 
the  clergy,  he  put  his  seat  at  the  disposal  of  the  Assem- 
bly. The  cardinal  was  naturally  looked  upon  with  sus- 
picion by  the  popular  party.  He  retired  to  Ettenheim, 
a  dependency  of  his  Strasburg  bishopric,  lying  beyond 
the  French  frontier,  on  the  opposite  bank  of  the  Rhine. 
Here,  in  his  capacity  as  prince  of  the  Holy  Roman  Em- 
pire, he  raised  frequent  levies  of  troops  for  the  army  of 
the  Prince  de  Conde,  whom  he  aided  with  a  quite  un- 
expected and  amazing  energy.  Naturally,  again,  these 
proceedings  infuriated  the  popular  party.  De  Rohan 
was  constantly  being  denounced  in  the  National  Assem- 
bly, and  on  one  occasion  a  solemn  proposal  was  made 
to  indict  him  before  the  national  high  court.  The  As- 
sembly, however,  seeing  that  the  cardinal  was  out  of  its 
reach,  paid  no  heed  to  the  proposal,  although  it  was 
renewed  time  and  again,  but  quietly  contented  itself, 
after  the  cardinal's  flight,  with  ordering  the  municipal- 
ity of  Strasburg  to  lay  violent  hands  upon  all  the  prop- 
erty and  the  estates  of  the  fugitive.  It  is  a  queer  pict- 
ure which  history  paints  for  us,  of  the  evil  old  cardinal 
who  had  been  so  base  and  who  had  done  so  much  harm, 
deprived  of  his  vast  revenues  and  living  a  modest  and 
frugal  life,  intent  only  on  securing  the  happiness  of  his 
diocese,  now  reduced  to  a  small  patch  of  territory  on 
the  right  bank  of  the  Rhine.  He  had  been  as  profli- 
gate and  as  pitiable  as  Sardanapalus  ;  it  is  curious  to 
find  that  in  the  last  flicker  of  his  old  age  he  showed 
something  of  the  strenuous  spirit  that  animated  the 


224 


THE    FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIV. 


Assyrian  prince.  He  died  on  February  16,  1803,  in  the 
sixty-ninth  year  of  his  ignominious  life.  "His  noble 
conduct,"  says  M.  Imbert  de  Saint-Amand,  "his  gen- 
erous help  to  the  Emigrants,  the  reforms  operated  in 
his  morals  in  some  measure  expiated  his  past  faults,  and, 
finishing  devoutly  a  life  that  had  so  long  been  scandal- 
ous, he  died  at  Ettenheim  in  peace." 

The  scoundrelly  male  De  la  Motte  outlived  every  per- 
son connected  with  the  affair  of  the  collar.  He  drifted 
through  all  manner  of  perils  and  degradations  and  mis- 
eries, sinking  lower  and  lower  as  the  years  went  by. 
In  1825 — it  is  Feuillet  de  Conches  who  tells  the  tale — 
a  man  bowed  down  by  age  and  misery  presented  him- 
self at  M.  de  Lavan's  bureau,  and  was  received  by  the 
chief  of  his  cabinet,  a  man  of  great  merit  and  high  char- 
acter, M.  Duplessis.  It  was  Count  de  la  Motte,  who 
came  to  ask  for  bread.  M.  Duplessis  talked  with  him 
about  the  Diamond  Necklace,  and  suggested  that  he 
should  write  his  memoirs,  including  his  reminiscences 
of  the  mysterious  episode.  La  Motte  thereupon  wrote 
what  was  suggested,  and  with  every  appearance  of  good 
faith.  His  notes  only  confirmed  the  details  which  were 
already  known.  The  queen's  memory  had  no  need  of 
being  cleared  by  a  poor  broken-down  wretch  who,  after 
having  helped  to  cast  a  shadow  upon  her  fame  by  con- 
tributing to  the  calumnies  of  his  wife,  now  came  for- 
ward, under  the  stress  of  misery,  to  deny  them  to  a 
Royalist  government  which  might  be  willing  to  pay 
solidly  for  the  denial.  Still  it  was  none  the  less  pre- 
cious to  have  an  authentic  denial  written  by  one  of  the 
principal  actors  in  this  too  famous  drama.  If  De  la 
Motte  was  an  old  man,  worn  down  by  misfortune,  he 
still  retained  all  his  intelligence,  understanding  the  char- 
acter of  his  atonement,  and  making  it,  according  to  the 


1831.  THE  LAST  OF  COUNT   DE   LA  MOTTE.  225 

opinion  of  M.  Duplessis,  in  all  good  faith.  Out  of  re- 
spect to  hallowed  memories  ;  out  of  respect,  above  all, 
to  the  daughter  of  Louis  XVI.,  to  whom  the  resuscita- 
tion of  the  name  of  De  la  Motte  would  have  been  the 
cause  of  considerable  grief,  M.  de  Lavan  thought  it  best 
to  envelop  in  obscurity  the  few  days  this  unfortunate 
being  had  still  to  live. 

It  seems  that  the  pretensions  of  the  scoundrelly  male 
De  la  Motte  were  exceedingly  modest.  All  he  asked 
was  an  annuity  of  from  three  hundred  to  four  hundred 
francs  for  life,  and  his  admission  into  the  Hospice  de 
Chaillot.  He  had  still  some  years  of  miserable  life  be- 
fore him,  and  we  are  told  that  during  the  last  years  of 
his  existence  the  count,  who  was  commonly  known  by 
the  nickname  of  "  Valois-Collier,"  took  his  daily  stroll 
beneath  the  famous  "  Galeries  de  Bois "  of  the  Palais 
Royal,  those  galleries  where  Balzac's  Lucien  de  Ru- 
bempre  wandered,  and  which  have  long  since  joined 
the  Snows  of  Tester- Year.  To  the  very  last,  therefore, 
the  count  affected  the  neighborhood  of  his  old  haunts, 
the  gambling-saloons  of  the  Palais  Royal.  For  some 
half  a  dozen  years  this  strange  figure,  like  some  queer, 
withered,  evil  old  ghost,  haunted  the  Paris  in  which  he 
had  played  so  vile  a  part.  His  face  may  often  have 
been  looked  upon  by  those  brilliant  young  men  who 
were  yet  to  be  known  as  "  Young  France."  They  may 
well  have  shuddered  in  the  sunlight  as  they  saw  that 
ugly  memento  of  an  ugly  past  creep  by  them  in  the 
day.  Overwhelmed  by  infirmity  and  misery,  he  died 
at  last  in  the  month  of  November,  1831,  having  almost 
reached  his  eightieth  year. 
I.— 15 


226  THE   FKENCH  KEVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 


CHAPTER   XV. 

SOWING    THE     WIND. 

WHEN  Turgot  was  whistled  down  the  wind  a  new 
man  made  his  appearance  upon  the  stage,  and  tried  his 
hand  at  the  desperate  game  of  somehow  pulling  French 
finance  together.  An  ingenious,  obsequious  M.  Clugny 
de  Nuis  took  the  control  of  finance.  This  Clugny  de 
Nuis  is  almost  forgotten  in  history.  Famous  or  infa- 
mous in  his  time,  and  among  his  townsfolk  of  Bordeaux, 
for  his  debaucheries,  he  had  been  branded  by  an  epi- 
gram which  found  in  the  letters  of  his  name  the  words 
"  Indignus  Luce."  Knowing  that  his  immoralities  would 
not  commend  him  to  the  austere  Louis  XVI.,  he  affected 
a  passion  for  lock-making,  and  imported  two  locksmiths 
from  Germany  to  perfect  him  in  the  art.  But  neither 
disfavor  with  the  virtuous  nor  favor  with  a  locksmith 
monarch  was  to  be  of  much  moment  to  him.  He  had 
his  controller-generalship,  but,  like  Richard  in  the  play, 
he  did  not  keep  it  long.  He  died  in  October  of  1776, 
in  consequence,  it  was  said,  of  some  desperate  indulgence 
in  debauchery,  .and  there  stepped  at  once  into  his  place 
the  official  who  had  taken  what  may  be  called  the  sec- 
retaryship to  the  treasury,  Necker,  the  Genevese  banker. 
Necker  was  still  quite  a  young  man.  Born  in  1732,  he 
was  only  forty-four  years  of  age.  Already  he  was  be- 
ginning to  show  some  signs  of  that  corpulence  which 
was  in  later  years  to  set  the  court  smiling  at  his  bulk ; 
already  his  chin  was  markedly  doubling.  On  the  whole 


1732-1804.  NECKER.  227 

he  was  a  striking-looking  man,  with  brown,  vivacious, 
piercing  eyes,  with  arched  and  bushy  eyebrows,  with 
closely  drawn  mouth,  with  feminine  forehead.  He  held 
his  head  high,  and  yet,  in  spite  of  his  stiff  demeanor,  he 
was  awkward  in  carriage  and  embarrassed  in  manner. 
He  was  bulky  of  body  and  colorless  of  complexion, 
easily  depressed,  a  great  feeder,  and  yet  always  hungry. 
The  sound  of  his  voice  was  not  agreeable  to  listen  to, 
and  his  elocution  was  not  easy.  His  efforts  at  wit  were 
of  the  most  ponderous  kind,  and  he  always  exaggerated 
any  social  part  he  strove  to  play,  being  absurdly  rever- 
ential where  he  might  wish  to  assume  a  studied  polite- 
ness, heavily  complimentary  where  he  wished  to  flatter. 
He  was  an  excellent  banker,  no  better  in  any  of  the 
great  European  houses,  and  if  France  could  have  been 
saved  by  a  display  of  the  qualities  that  enable  a  pushing 
young  man  to  rise  to  eminence  in  a  banker's  counting- 
house,  Necker  would  undoubtedly  have  saved  France. 
But  France  unhappily  wanted  more  than  a  fine  head  for 
figures ;  it  wanted  statesmanship,  and  of  statesmanship 
Necker  had  nothing  at  all.  Nobody,  it  has  been  hap- 
pily said,  can  be  a  great  statesman  without  imagination, 
and  with  imagination  Necker  was  painfully  unprovided. 
But  he  had  a  comprehensive,  consuming  belief  in  him- 
self, which  had  counted  for  much  in  the  past,  and  which 
his  career  hitherto  had  indeed  amply  justified.  When 
he  was  fifteen  years  old,  his  father,  a  professor  of  public 
law  in  Geneva,  had  sent  him  to  Paris  to  the  great  bank- 
ing-house of  Vernet.  Like  the  good  boys  in  the  stories, 
his  abilities  earned  him  the  admiration  of,  and  finally  a 
partnership  with,  his  master.  The  Thellusson  brothers 
allowed  him  to  share  in  their  great  enterprises;  every- 
thing he  touched  seemed  to  bring  him  luck.  While  still  a 
comparatively  young  man  he  found  himself  a  millionaire 


228 


THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 


among  millionaires,  wealthy  in  a  world  of  wealth.  On 
the  roll  of  fame  whereon  the  names  of  great  bankers  are 
traced,  the  name  of  Necker  stood  gratif  yingly  high.  But 
the  millionaire  banker  was  not  satisfied.  He  had  other 
ambitions;  he  wished  to  make  himself  a  reputation  in  the 
world  of  politics  and  in  the  world  of  letters.  His  ardu- 
ous youth  had  not  allowed  him  time  to  acquire  any  great 
degree  of  culture;  he  now  strove  to  make  up  the  deficien- 
cy. He  set  to  work  to  accomplish  these  two  great  aims 
as  he  would  have  set  to  work  to  float  some  brilliant  finan- 
cial scheme.  He  determined  to  enrich  his  mind  with 
the  education  he  had  missed,  to  create  out  of  Necker 
the  banker  a  Necker  the  man  of  letters.  He  read  hard, 
he  surrounded  himself  with  men  of  letters ;  his  strongest 
aid  in  his  new  purpose  was  his  wife.  In  his  marriage, 
as  in  everything  else,  he  was  singularly  lucky.  Made- 
moiselle Suzanne  Curchod  came  of  a  family  that  had 
been  ruined  and  proscribed  by  the  Edict  of  Nantes. 
She  had  been  carefully  educated ;  she  had  turned  her 
education  to  account  in  keeping  a  school  at  Geneva. 
She  was  neither  beautiful  nor  graceful,  but  her  face  was 
striking  and  interesting,  and  she  was,  what  was  of  great 
importance  in  that  age,  a  very  brilliant  conversational- 
ist. She  was  the  very  woman  to  make  an  ideal  wife  for 
an  ambitious  banker.  She  set  up  her  salon  in  Paris, 
after  the  fashion  of  Madame  Geoffrin  and  Madame  du 
Deffand  ;  Marmontel  and  Thomas  were  put  to  work  to 
create  a  society  for  her ;  her  Fridays  soon  became  fa- 
mous in  a  certain  set,  and  scholars,  poets,  Encyclopae- 
dists, and  great  nobles  with  literary  leanings  honored  her 
salon  with  their  presence.  Madame  de  Stael,  passing  a 
plain-featured,  precocious  infancy  in  such  surroundings, 
has  left  her  account  of  these  gatherings,  and  the  heart- 
burnings they  used  to  cause  from  the  difficulty  of  keep- 


1*776.  MADAME  NECKER.  220 

ing  all  the  irritable  geniuses  of  literature  and  philos- 
ophy, of  prose  and  verse,  in  that  serene  condition  of 
flattered  content  which  allowed  them  to  be  agreeable 
to  others. 

At  the  time  when,  in  1776,  Necker  assumed  the 
controller -generalship,  Madame  Necker's  comeliness 
had  passed  in  great  measure  away.  She  had  grown 
very  thin  ;  she  was  suffering  from  the  earliest  attacks 
of  a  nervous  malady  which  at  last  reduced  her  to  such 
a  condition  that  she  could  not  keep  in  the  same  posi- 
tion for  more  than  a  few  minutes  at  a  time,  so  that 
when  she  went  to  the  theatre  she  was  obliged  to  keep 
in  the  back  of  the  box,  and  balance  herself  alternately 
first  on  one  leg  and  then  on  the  other.  She  was  very 
charitable,  and  her  charity  aided  the  popularity  of  her 
husband.  She  founded  a  hospital  in  the  Rue  de  Sevres, 
to  which  the  name  of  Necker  clung ;  she  was  entirely 
absorbed  in  admiration  for  her  husband's  genius,  and 
the  ardent  desire  to  urge  and  aid  it  as  much  as  possible 
to  its  legitimate  and  lofty  conclusion. 

A  certain  flavor  of  romance  lingers  around  the  name 
and  fame  of  Madame  Keeker.  She  was  born  in  the 
Pays  de  Vaud,  in  the  Presbytery  of  Grassier.  She  was 
the  daughter  of  a  respectable,  sufficiently  learned,  and 
somewhat  Richteresque  Swiss  pastor.  We  are  told 
that  the  simple  white  house,  with  its  green  shutters, 
may  still  be  seen,  separated  from  the  main  road  by  a 
little  garden  planted  with  fruit-trees.  How  many  of 
the  amiable  and  amatory  young  ministers  of  Grassier 
who  recognized  the  growing  charms  of  Suzanne  Curchod 
and  cast  glances  between  the  fruit-trees  as  they  walked 
by  the  Curchod  garden,  guessed  at  the  restless  ambi- 
tion that  sheltered  itself  behind  the  green  shutters  ? 
Suzanne  Curchod  was  an  educated  young  woman.  If 


230  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 

she  reminds  one  a  little  of  Byron's  heroine  who  knew 
"  Latin,  that  is,  the  Lord's  Prayer,  and  Greek,  the  al- 
phabet, I'm  nearly  sure,"  if  her  plunges  into  science 
were  scarcely  so  profound  as  those  of  Madame  du  Cha- 
telet,  her  accomplishments  were  quite  enough  to  make 
her  remarkable,  and,  when  coupled  with  her  youth  and 
comeliness,  to  make  her  think  more  than  well  of  her- 
self. But  she  was  not  content  with  her  neat  looks  and 
her  learning ;  she  burned  as  eagerly  as  Mirabeau  him- 
self with  a  desire  for  noble  ancestry.  She  raked  out 
from  the  obscurity  of  history  some  Curchods  or  Curcho- 
dis  who  battled  in  old  time  for  Savoy,  and  tried  hard 
with  no  encouragement  from  royal  genealogists  to  per- 
suade herself  that  these  were  her  illustrious  ancestors. 

While  she  was  still  quite  a  young  girl  she  was  taken 
to  Lausanne — Lausanne  as  yet  blissfully  indifferent  to 
the  sojourn  of  Gibbon,  blissfully  unconscious  of  the 
existence  of  Casanova.  In  Lausanne,  Mademoiselle 
Curchod  made  quite  a  sensation.  She  was  allowed  to 
found  one  of  those  dreary  little  academies  of  which 
Rome  had  set  the  fashion  with  its  stucco  Arcadia,  an 
Academic  de  la  Poudriere,  over  which  she  presided  as 
Themire.  In  Lausanne,  too,  she  loved  and  was  beloved 
by  the  great  Gibbon.  Gibbon  cuts  a  somewhat  un- 
graceful figure  in  the  business.  We  all  know  how  he 
sighed  as  a  lover,  obeyed  as  a  son.  Perhaps  Gibbon 
was  not  a  marrying  man.  He  was,  in  obedience  to  des- 
tiny, to  write  the  "  Decline  and  Fall,"  and  drink  all 
those  pipes  of  sweet  wine  which  were  so  bad  for  him. 
She  had  a  higher  destiny  before  her  than  to  be  the  wife 
of  a  corpulent  historian.  She  thought  she  was  broken- 
hearted ;  she  allowed  her  faithful  and  quite  hopeless 
lover,  Moulton,  to  get  Rousseau  to  put  pressure  on  the 
departed  Gibbon  in  vain.  When  her  parents  died,  she 


1*764-76.  THE  NECKERS.  231 

came  to  Paris  as  the  companion  of  Madame  de  Ver- 
menoux,  a  rich  widow,  and  met  at  her  house  the  partner 
in  Thellusson's  bank,  M.  Necker,  a  rejected  and,  it  was 
presumed,  despairing  suitor  of  Madame  de  Vermenoux. 
Necker  fell,  however,  promptly  in  love  with  Suzanne 
Curehod,  and  the  judicious  diplomacy  of  the  devoted 
and  self-denying  Moulton  brought  about  the  marriage 
in  1764,  and  launched  a  very  ambitious  woman  upon  a 
very  remarkable  career. 

When  Necker  took  office  he  could  look  back  with 
satisfaction  upon  an  eminently  successful  past.  Thanks 
to  himself,  he  had  made  money,  won  distinction,  taken 
the  front  rank  in  the  great  financial  fight.  Thanks  to 
his  position  as  minister  for  the  republic  of  Geneva,  he 
had  gained  that  entry  to  the  court  of  Versailles  which 
had  brought  him  into  contact  with  the  brilliant  world 
of  stars  and  titles  and  ancestral  names.  Thanks  to  his 
wife,  he  had  a  salon  as  well  attended  as  any  in  all  Paris ; 
he  could  bid  beneath  his.  roof  at  any  time  the  Grimms, 
the  Diderots,  the  Marmontels,  the  Galianis,  theD'Alem- 
berts,  the  Buffons,  the  Raynals,  all  the  crowd  of  wits 
and  men  of  genius,  without  whom  no  salon  could  be 
said  to  exist.  Famous  women,  too,  which  was  even 
more  important,  thronged  his  halls.  Madame  Geoffrin, 
Madame  du  Deffand,  Madame  d'Houdentot,  the  sweet 
little  Duchess  de  Lauzun,  the  charming  wife  of  a  pict- 
uresque, heartless  rapscallion,  for  whom,  alas  !  the  Ter- 
ror waits,  the  Marechale  de  Luxembourg,  that  crown 
and  glory  of  the  Old  Regime — all  these  were  among  his 
friends  ;  some  were  his  devoted  friends.  The  Duchess 
de  Lauzun  was  among  the  devoted  friends  ;  she  carried 
her  devotion  so  far  as  actually  to  slap  the  face  of  some 
one  in  the  Tuileries  Gardens  who  spoke  slightingly  of 
the  great  Necker.  Thanks  to  his  daughter,  too,  the 


^32  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 

witty,  but  certainly  not  beautiful,  Germaine,  Necker's 
importance  was  increased.  She  had  been  sought  in 
marriage  by  William  Pitt,  the  rising  star  of  English 
statesmanship  ;  she  had  been  sought  in  marriage  by 
Prince  George  Augustus  of  Mecklenburg,  brother  of 
the  reigning  duke.  Had  she  not,  in  the  very  January 
of  this  marvellous  year,  1776,  been  given  in  marriage  to 
the  Baron  de  Stael-Holstein,  the  ambassador  from 
Sweden  and  Gustavus  III.  ?  It  may  be  admitted  that 
Necker  as  he  entered  upon  office  had  a  very  satisfac- 
tory past  to  look  back  upon.  Wealthy,  popular,  in- 
fluential, moving  in  the  best  society,  adored  by  his  wife, 
adored  by  his  daughter,  adored  by  a  good  and  gracious 
duchess,  and  now  controller-general  of  finance  and  tri- 
umphant over  Turgot — what  could  a  man  born  of  a 
woman  wish  for  more  ?  And  yet  Necker  did  wish  for 
more  ;  in  bis  solid,  slightly  stolid  way  he  saw  a  mag- 
nificent destiny  before  him  in  which  he  was  to  play  an 
unprecedented  part,  and  be  hailed  by  a  reformed  France 
as  its  true  father.  Men  are  given  on  very  little  provo- 
cation to  imagine  themselves  saviors  of  society.  It  is 
clear  that  Necker  had  a  good  deal  of  provocation  to 
believe  that  destiny  had  marked  him  out  as  a  savior  of 
society.  The  author  of  the  "E^oge"  of  Colbert  was 
now  to  be  the  author  of  the  "  Compte  Rendu  " — that 
memorable  "Account  Rendered."  That  any  man  should 
attempt  to  throw  some  light  upon  the  darknesses  of 
French  finance,  that  he  should  actually  set  down  in  sim- 
ple figures,  which  all  who  ran  might  read,  a  statement 
of  receipts  and  a  statement  of  expenditure,  seemed  a  sort 
of  miracle.  It  roused  up  a  whirlwind  against  him,  but 
it  won  him  friends,  admirers,  fanatics,  all  over  France. 
The  period  of  Necker's  administration  was  a  fatal 
period  for  France.  The  American  War  of  Independ- 


1776.         THE  AMERICAN1   WAR  OF  INDEPENDENCE.          233 

ence  broke  out,  and  France  was  drawn  into  the  strug- 
gle. The  reasons  which  led  France  to  take  a  share  in 
the  conflict  were  twofold  :  a  desire  for  revenge  upon 
England  for  her  successes  over  the  French  arms  in 
Canada  and  India,  with  the  consequent  diminution  of 
French  empire  ;  and,  secondly,  a  commercial  desire  for 
traffic  with  the  American  ports,  which  were  sealed  by 
the  English  supremacy  to  all  but  English  ships.  The 
war  was  a  triumph  for  the  federated  states,  a  humilia- 
tion for  England,  a  catastrophe  for  France.  Brilliant, 
high-minded  young  officers  like  Lafayette,  brilliant, 
base-minded  young  nobles  like  Lauzun,  might  win  glory; 
avid,  unscrupulous,  adventurous  men  of  letters  like 
Beaumarchais  might  see  their  way  to  the  turning  of  a 
dishonest  penny  out  of  the  business.  But  France  her- 
self had  not  the  means  for  supporting  such  a  war. 
Necker  could  not  increase  the  taxation  ;  he  could  not, 
to  any  appreciable  extent,  economize  ;  he  had  to  bor- 
row, and  he  did  borrow  with  both  hands.  But,  how- 
ever fatal  his  borrowings  were  to  the  welfare  of  France, 
it  was  not  they  that  brought  about  his  own  temporary 
downfall.  It  was  his  efforts  after  reform  in  the  finan- 
cial systems  of  the  country  which  massed  against  him 
a  legion  of  adversaries  whom  a  stronger  man  than 
Necker  could  not  have  withstood.  He  had  against  him 
Turgot  and  the  Turgotist  economists,  who  did  not  for- 
give his  succession  to  Turgot  and  his  destruction  of 
Turgot's  plans.  He  had  against  him  all  the  financial 
world,  high  and  low,  all  the  privileged  in  the  adminis- 
tration and  in  the  court ;  he  had  against  him  the  par- 
liaments ;  he  had  against  him  the  ministers  ;  he  had 
against  him  De  Maurepas  ;  he  had  practically  against 
him  the  king,  who  certainly  was  not  for  him.  There 
was  nothing  for  a  disappointed  and  indignant  Necker 


234  THE  PRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 

to  do  but  to  resign,  and  resign  he  accordingly  did  on 
May  19,  1781,  in  a  very  cold  letter  to  Louis,  in  which 
he  expressed  the  hope  that  the  king  would  cherish  some 
memory  of  the  years  of  hard  but  happy  work,  and  the 
boundless  zeal  which  he  had  given  to  his  service. 

Necker  thus  knocked  off  his  perch  and  sulking  in 
dignified  retirement  at  Saint-Ouen,  the  question  arose 
who  was  to  carry  on  the  fortunes  of  a  bankrupt  and 
floundering  monarchy.  Even  if  any  one  had  thought 
of  Turgot,  Turgot  was  out  of  the  question,  for  Turgot 
had  died  shortly  before  the  resignation  of  his  rival 
Necker.  Controller  Joly  de  Fleury  tried  his  hand  at 
the  muddle — tried  his  hand  for  a  season,  during  which, 
on  November  14,  1781,  De  Maurepas  died,  to  the  great 
grief  of  the  king.  De  Maurepas  had  done  all  that  lay 
in  him  to  ruin  France,  and  died  no  doubt  serene  in  the 
conviction  that  he  was  a  great  statesman  and  had  con- 
ferred incalculable  benefits  upon  his  country.  Then 
Joly  de  Fleury  dropped  out  of  the  great  financial  game 
or  puzzle  of  how  to  make  a  bankrupt  state  seem  to  be 
thriving,  and  Controller  d'Ormesson  took  his  place  and 
tried  his  hand  for  a  while,  till  be,  too,  dropped  out  of 
the  game,  and  his  place  was  taken  by  a  new,  pushing, 
successful  man  who  was  called  Calonne. 

The  overthrow  of  Necker  was  the  signal  for  a  series 
of  demonstrations  in  his  honor  such  as  might  well  con- 
vince him  that  he  was  the  idol  and  the  destined  savior 
of  France.  France  was  flooded  with  engravings  in  his 
praise,  now  representing  him  struggling  with  the  hid- 
eous figure  of  Envy  wearing  the  mask  of  Hypocrisy, 
now  representing  his  bust  securely  planted  on  Envy 
overthrown,  now  representing  his  medallion  held  on 
high  by  the  adoring  arms  of  a  Minerva-like  Virtue,  now 
giving  him  as  armorial  bearing  a  single  sleepless  eye 


1783-87.  DOING  THE  IMPOSSIBLE.  235 

with  the  assurance  that  nothing  past,  present,  or  future 
escaped  its  vigilance  ;  this  last  dedicated  in  all  enthu- 
siasm to  his  illustrious  son-in-law  of  Stael-Holstein. 
Now,  too,  began  that  creation  and  distribution  of  busts 
of  the  popular  fallen  minister,  busts  which  should  yet 
play  a  significant  and  grim  part  in  history.  Seldom 
has  a  defeated  minister  been  so  bepictured,  bestatued, 
bedaubed  with  praise.  Saint-Ouen — not,  be  it  noted, 
the  Saint-Ouen  that  is  later  to  be  associated  with  Louis 
XVIII.,  but  another  place  near  by  of  like  name — be- 
came the  Mecca  of  a  world  of  adoring  visitors.  There 
was,  says  Grimm,  a  well-nigh  perpetual  procession  of 
carriages  to  the  sacred  seclusion.  Was  it  surprising  if 
Achilles  Necker  in  his  tent  at  Saint-Ouen  thought  that 
the  fate  and  the  fortunes  of  France  depended  upon  his 
single  arm  ? 

To  outward  appearance  Necker's  successor,  Galon ne, 
was  not  unpleasing.  Those  who  looked  upon  him  in 
the  flesh,  as  we  look  upon  him  in  contemporary  portrait- 
ure, saw  a  sufficiently  comely  gentleman,  brave  in  star 
and  ribbon,  with  a  fine  oval  face,  expansive  forehead, 
wide,  keen  eyes,  and  a  firm  mouth — a  man  with  a  look 
of  courtly  courage  that  was  not  unattractive.  Courtly, 
indeed,  he  was.  Was  there  ever  a  more  courtly  phrase 
uttered  than  that  in  which,  in  answer  to  some  request 
of  Marie  Antoinette's,  he  replied  :  "  Madame,  if  it  is  pos- 
sible, it  is  done  ;  if  it  is  impossible,  it  shall  be  done." 
Yet  we  may  well  believe  that  as  he  bowed  over  the 
royal  white  hand,  that  as  he  uttered  this  insane  epi- 
gram, the  bold  eyes  smiled  at  his  own  audacity,  and 
that  behind  his  brazen  mask  his  tongue  was  in  his 
cheek.  He  was  certainly  courageous.  Only  a  man  of 
courage  could  have  taken  such  a  post,  and  could  in 
such  a  post  have  acted  as  Calonne  acted.  There  are 


236  THE  ttffiNCtt  REVOLtTiOtf.  CH.  XV. 

many  interpretations  of  Calonne's  character.  He  has 
been  portrayed  as  a  kind  of  desperate  gentleman  ad- 
venturer, treating  finance  with  the  hardy  audacity  of  a 
Grand  Seigneur  making  love  to  a  pretty  woman  who 
has  only  to  be  rallied  a  little  brusquely  to  yield  the 
heart's  desire.  He  has  been  described  by  Louis  Blanc 
as  a  cold  and  crafty  calculator,  whose  light-hearted  au- 
dacity was  but  one  studied  factor  in  the  sum  of  his  keen 
and  daring  schemes.  He  has  even  had  his  admirers,  who 
are  pleased  to  see  in  him  a  patriot  sacrificed  to  the  self- 
ishness of  others. 

Whatever  Calonne's  schemes  may  have  been,  what- 
ever his  hidden  purpose,  whether  mere  reckless  prodi- 
gality, the  childish  delight  in  making  the  money  spin 
while  he  could,  or  the  deep-laid,  well-nigh  medical  pur- 
pose of  humoring  privilege  to  the  top  of  its  bent,  and 
then  when  the  money  was  all  gone  frightening  it  into 
acquiescence  in  infinitely  needed  reform — whatever  Ca- 
lonne's purpose,  the  facts  are  plain  enough.  Calonne 
raised  borrowing  to  the  level  of  a  fine  art,  and  he  spent 
with  splendid  magnificence.  Did  any  one  want  money, 
let  him  come  to  Calonne.  Had  the  queen  any  desire  the 
realization  of  which  involved  the  spending  of  large  sums, 
was  not  Calonne,  her  devoted  servant,  ready  to  do  the 
impossible  ?  He  squandered  money  with  Aladdin-like 
alacrity  ;  had  he  been  Fortunatus,  Midas,  and  Monte 
Cristo  all  rolled  into  one,  he  could  scarcely  have  made 
a  braver  show  for  the  time.  What  magnificent  pal- 
aces were  bought  for  royal  pleasure-taking — beautiful 
Rambouillet,  where  the  swans  float  on  enchanted  wa- 
ters ;  beautiful  Saint-Cloud,  and  many  another  place 
of  beauty  !  Some  money,  indeed,  went  well  and  wisely 
for  Cherbourg  port ;  most  of  it  went  ill  and  foolishly, 
whether  with  plan  or  without.  Calonne  set  himself  to 


1783-87.  CALOXXE    THE    REFORMER.  237 

rebuilding  the  Avails  of  Paris,  and  increasing  the  effi- 
cacy of  the  gatherers  of  the  hated  taxes  at  the  gates  in 
the  ugly  little  pavilions  built  by  Ledoux,  for  which 
piece  of  work  an  anonymous  pamphleteer,  presumed  to 
be  Mirabeau,  suggested  thatCalonne  ought  to  be  hanged. 
So  the  time  slipped  by,  glittering  with  magnificence, 
and  then  Calonne  began  to  find  that  he  too  had  his 
enemies.  It  was  said  freely  that  Calonne  had  looked 
after  himself — which  was  indeed  true  enough,  for  he 
had  induced  Louis  XVI.  to  pay  his  debts  on  his  as- 
sumption of  office  ;  he  was  accused  vaguely  of  various 
malpractices.  His  attempt,  sufficiently  excellent  in  its 
way,  to  renew  the  gold  coinage  was  made  a  most  potent 
weapon  of  attack  against  him.  Whether  Calonne  had 
now  come  to  the  ripe  moment  for  his  elaborate  scheme, 
or  whether,  like  some  more  commonplace  adventurer, 
he  had  only  come  to  the  end  of  his  tether,  in  either 
case  he  saw  that  it  was  time  to  make  a  new  move.  He 
made  a  new  move,  and  an  amazing  move.  Out  of  ex- 
isting chaos  he  evoked  the  Notables. 

Upon  the  king,  the  queen,  the  court,  the  appearance 
of  Calonne  in  his  new  character  ^as  the  reformer  was 
most  astonishing.  Here  was  the  light-hearted,  brisk, 
efficacious  maker  or  raiser  of  money,  the  buyer  of  pal- 
aces, the  doer  of  the  impossible,  actually  demanding  re- 
forms like  a  mere  Turgot  or  Necker.  The  man  in  the 
story  who  finds  the  creature  whom  he  has  looked  upon 
as  his  faithful  servant  suddenly  asserting  himself  as  his 
deadliest  enemy,  typifies  fairly  enough  the  feelings  of 
the  court  at  the  astounding  conversion,  under  their 
very  eyes,  of  Calonne  the  courtier  into  Calonne  the 
reformer.  Instantly  the  privileged  classes  ranged  them- 
selves against  him  as  they  had  ranged  themselves 
against  Turgot  and  against  Necker,  only  with  the  more 


238 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XV. 


ferocity  that  they  saw  in  Calonne  not  merely  an  enemy, 
but  a  traitor.  Well  might  the  Notables  alarm  all  those 
courtiers  who  were  flinging  money  to  the  four  winds,  all 
those  bourgeois  nobles  who  hated  and  were  hated  by 
the  men  to  whom  nobility  had  become  a  birth  caste,  all 
those  wealthy  men  of  the  middle  class  who  were  as 
scornful  of  and  as  detested  by  the  roturier  as  if  they 
boasted  the  bluest  blood  in  France,  all  those  princes  ec- 
clesiastical who  enjoyed  swollen  incomes  wrung  from 
the  rank  and  file  of  the  Church,  wrung  from  the  peas- 
antry, all  those  Commendatory  Abbes  who  frisked  on 
scarlet  heels  in  my  lady's  chamber,  all  those  intendants 
whom  Law  declared  to  be  the  real  governors  of  France, 
all  those  worthies  of  the  Periwig  Makers'  Guild  who 
wrangled  for  precedence  with  the  worthies  of  the  Ba- 
kers' Guild.  The  extraordinary  world  that  lived  by  and 
for  the  Old  Order  might  well  have  trembled  at  the  tread 
of  the  Notables  as  they  wended  their  way  to  Versailles, 
might  well  have  trembled  if  they  could  have  guessed 
what  echo  the  utterance  of  one  voice  in  that  Assembly 
would  awake. 

In  the  midst  of  all  the  bustle  and  excitement  of  the 
arriving  Notables,  Vergennes  died,  on  the  night  of  Jan- 
uary 12th.  Never  a  sovereign  indued  with  a  strong  spirit 
of  self-reliance,  Louis  was  accustomed  to  lean  very  heav- 
ily indeed  upon  the  ministers  in  whom  he  trusted,  and 
he  had  trusted  profoundly  in  Vergennes.  As  the  grave 
closed  over  the  coffin  of  the  dead  man,  the  luckless  king, 
with  tears  in  his  eyes,  was  overheard  to  mutter  the  un- 
kingly  words,  "  Oh,  how  happy  I  should  be  if  only  I 
were  lying  beside  y6u  in  that  grave  !"  The  epitaph  of 
the  house  of  Capet  was  sounded  in  that  piteous  wail  of 
the  weak  king,  who  felt  himself  upon  the  e'dge  of  events 
.too  potent  for  his  feeble  personality. 


1787.  MEETING  OF   THE   NOTABLES.  239 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

THE    NOTABLES. 

CALONNE  asked  for  his  Notables,  and  he  got  his  No- 
tables. From  all  parts  of  France,  the  nobility  and 
clergy  who,  with  less  than  a  dozen  other  persons,  made 
up  that  curious  body,  came  together  "in  the  bleak 
short  days."  On  February  22,  1787,  they  assembled, 
one  hundred  and  forty-four  of  them  in  all,  very  uncer- 
tain as  to  what  they  were  expected  to  do,  still  more  un- 
certain as  to  what  they,  with  their  peculiar  and  ill- 
defined  powers,  could  do.  They  were  divided  into 
eight  committees,  each  presided  over  by  a  prince  of 
the  royal  blood,  the  good  duke  of  Penthievre,  the  two 
false  royal  brothers  of  Provence  and  Artois,  the  duke 
of  Orleans  the  most  conspicuous.  The  duke  of  Orleans 
seemed  just  then  to  be  sunk  in  a  kind  of  sullen  tran- 
quillity or  angry  stupor — seemed  to  be  doing  nothing, 
and  even  thinking  nothing,  of  very  much  moment.  Yet 
we  may  well  believe  that  his  thoughts  were  as  moment- 
ous as  his  deeds  were  soon  to  prove  momentous. 

To  this  executive  assembly  Calonne  unbosomed  him- 
self. It  was  a  frank,  somewhat  cynical  process  ;  it 
looked  as  if  the  man  thought  that  the  luck  of  his  des- 
perate audacity  might  again  prevail  in  the  face  of  those 
committees — those  royal  princes,  those  Notables  steeped 
to  the  lips  in  privilege.  He  may  have  been  hopeful  ;  he 
certainly  acted  as  if  he  were  hopeful.  In  the  stately 
Salle  des  Menus,  destined  later  to  shelter  a  more  impor- 


240  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI. 

tant  assemblage,  he  faced  his  Notables  with  a  cool  cour- 
age which  may  almost  be  called  admirable.  His  Nota- 
bles indeed  they  were  in  a  sense.  The  Notables  were 
summoned,  each  individual  man  of  them,  by  special  or- 
der of  the  king  ;  and  Calonne,  acting  through  the  king, 
had  so  arranged  the  composition  of  the  body  as  to 
weaken  as  much  as  possible  the  various  forms  of  oppo- 
sition. Wittily,  airily,  audaciously  he  set  forth  before 
the  astounded  Notables  the  actual  condition  of  affairs. 
Deficit,  the  one  word  deficit,  that  was  the  burden  of  his 
swan  song,  that  was  the  real  fact  to  be  faced.  The  defi- 
cit, Calonne  contended,  was  not  all  his  fault,  and  he 
proceeded  swiftly  and  sharply  to  assail  Necker,  and  to 
controvert  the  "  Compte  Rendu  "  in  all  its  most  important 
particulars.  Then  he  denounced  the  abuses  of  the  priv- 
ileged orders  with  a  vehemence  which  does  something 
to  justify  the  fantastic  saying  of  Madame  de  Stae'l,  that 
Calonne  did  more  than  any  man  to  create  the  French 
Revolution.  Then  he  unfolded  his  own  plans  of  re- 
form, cutting  right  and  left  at  the  rotting  tree  of  feu- 
dalism, and  sat  down  before  the  furious  Notables,  an 
incarnation,  in  their  eyes,  of  rampant,  deadliest  democ- 
racy. 

The  furious  Notables  were  in  no  mood  to  take  Ca- 
lonne quietly.  Their  fury  blew  upon  him  from  all  the 
bureaux.  He  was  like  a  man  in  some  wild  cave  of  the 
winds,  around  whom  all  the  hurricanes  raged  and  wran- 
gled. All  his  glittering  words,  all  his  bright  audaci- 
ties were  now  of  no  avail.  The  bureaux  clamored  for 
his  accounts — a  significant  and  most  disagreeable  de- 
mand. If  sheer  picturesque  urbanity,  if  a  tongue 
glibbed  with  all  manner  of  soft  speeches  and  smooth 
speeches  and  hopeful  speeches,  could  have  got  Calonne 
out  of  the  slough  of  despond  into  which  he  had  waded 


1787.  CALOXNE  DISMISSED.  241 

so  cheerily,  Calonne  had  been  a  rescued  adventurer. 
But  they  did  not,  could  not,  save  him.  The  Notables 
were  open  enemies ;  Calonne  had  secret  enemies  too. 
Monseigneur  Lomenie  de  Brienne,  Archbishop  of  Tou- 
louse, had  got  it  somehow  or  other  into  his  vain  head 
that  he  was  the  man  to  save  France  at  this  crisis — the 
number  of  persons  who  were  convinced  that  they  and 
they  alone  could  save  France  was  appalling  ;  he  had 
somehow  or  other  impressed  the  same  belief  in  his  own 
fitness  into  the  mind  of  Abbe  Vermond,  Marie  Antoi- 
nette's adviser,  and  also  into  the  head  of  the  keeper  of 
the  seals,  Miromenil,  whom  Calonne  looked  upon  as  a 
trusty  adherent.  When  Calonne  got  wind  of  the  con- 
spiracy, he  promptly  dismissed  Miromenil  and  ap- 
pointed Lamoignon  in  his  stead,  but  it  was  now  too 
late.  The  sun  of  Calonne's  splendor  was  setting  ;  he 
had  fought  a  good  fight  if  he  had  not  kept  the  faith, 
but  his  time  was  up.  On  April  1 7th  he  was  dismissed, 
and  Lomenie  de  Brienne  reigned  in  his  place  over  the 
perplexing  collectorship.  "  The  expelled  Calonne," 
says  indignant  English  Perry,  "  now  came  over  to  Lon- 
don, in  which  court  he  conjectured  that  these  pecca- 
dillos do  no  injury  to  a  minister's  reputation.  The 
warmth  of  friendship  he  has  uniformly  experienced 
ever  since  from  the  court  and  the  cabinet  ministers 
prove  that  he  was  in  the  right." 

In  all  the  noise  of  the  storm  that  blew  Calonne  from 
his  post,  the  utterances  of  a  certain  young  voice  were 
drowned  and  made  little  impression.  Yet  those  utter- 
ances were  more  significant  and  more  important  than 
anything  else  that  was  said  during  the  whole  of  the 
troubled  existence  of  the  Notables.  In  the  bureau  that 
was  presided  over  by  the  Count  d'Artois  there  was  pres- 
ent a  young  man  who  thought  a  good  deal  of  himself, 
I.— 16 


242  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI. 

and  whom  some  people  were  beginning  to  think  a  good 
deal  of — the  Marquis  de  Lafayette.  Young  Lafayette 
of  the  many  names — he  had  seven  of  them,  Marie  Jean 
Paul  Roch  Yves  Gilbert  du  Mottier — was  born  in  Au- 
vergne,  in  the  September  of  1757,  of  a  stately  race  of 
soldiers.  Though  he  was  only  thirty  years  old  when 
the  Notables  assembled,  he  had  already  lived  a  soldier's 
life  in  his  generation.  His  boyhood,  we  are  told,  was 
even  more  deeply  imbued  with  heroic  longings  than 
that  of  most  generous  youths  of  warlike  stock.  He 
dreamed  of  slaying  fabulous  monsters  like  a  new  The- 
seus. He  was  made  a  musketeer  when  he  was  only  thir- 
teen years  old;  he  was  married  to  a  granddaughter  of 
the  Duke  de  Noailles  when  he  was  sixteen;  when  he 
was  scarcely  twenty,  and  longing  for  the  active  career 
of  arms,  his  attention  was  captivated  by  the  outbreak 
of  the  American  Revolution.  In  defiance  of  the  wishes 
of  his  own  government,  he  crossed  the  Atlantic  and  of- 
fered his  bright  sword  to  Washington. 

Some  critics  have  formed  a  very  poor  opinion  of  La- 
fayette's merits  in  the  American  business  and  after. 
They  say  that  even  if  his  birth  and  natural  disposition 
had  not  made  him  vain,  the  reception  he  met  with  in 
America  would  have  been  enough  to  turn  a  wiser  young 
man's  head.  Though  he  was  only  twenty,  though  he 
had  never  set  a  squadron  in  the  field  nor  the  division 
of  a  battle  knew  more  than  a  spinster,  Washington  gave 
him  important  commands,  in  which  he  exhibited  great 
personal  courage,  but  gave  no  signs  of  any  military  abil- 
ity. It  was  the  policy  of  Washington,  according  to  this 
hostile  criticism,  to  win  the  active  help  of  France  by,  on 
every  possible  occasion,  linking  Lafayette's  name  with 
his  own.  In  this  way  Lafayette  acquired  as  much  fame 
in  America  and  in  his  own  country  as  Washington  him- 


1787.  LAFAYETTE.  243 

self;  and  when  he  returned  to  France,  in  1779,  to  beg 
for  the  assistance  of  a  French  army,  he  found  himself 
hailed  as  a  conquering  hero.  The  king  gave  him  the 
command  of  the  Royal  Dragoons,  and  he  returned  to 
America  more  convinced  than  ever  of  his  military  ge- 
nius. He  served  through  the  last  campaigns,  and  was  in 
command  at  the  capitulation  of  Lord  Cornwallis  at  York- 
town.  Then  he  came  back  to  France,  after  the  conclu- 
sion of  the  war,  to  find  himself  still  regarded  as  a  war- 
rior famous  for  fight.  He  was  praised  in  the  Bull's 
Eye,  acclaimed  in  the  streets,  applauded  in  the  theatres, 
arid  flattered  in  the  salons.  It  is  not,  perhaps,  surpris- 
ing if  he  came  to  regard  this  flattery  as  his  due;  if  he 
became  a  thought  conceited  as  to  his  military  merits. 
It  is  more  to  be  regretted  that  he  tried  to  play  the  part 
of  a  leader  of  the  gay  young  French  nobility  as  well  as 
a  great  general,  with  far  less  qualifications  for  the  part. 
One  day  he  had  managed,  with  great  pains,  to  get  drunk, 
and  his  last  words,  as  he  was  being  helped  into  his  car- 
riage, were,  "  Do  not  forget  to  tell  Noailles  how  splen- 
didly I  have  been  drinking."  A  sorry  piece  of  feather- 
headed  affectation  for  the  hero  of  Yorktown  ! 

But  if  there  is  much  to  prompt  an  unfavorable  judg- 
ment, much  must  be  admitted  on  the  other  side.  La- 
fayette's American  admirers  maintain,  with  great  rea- 
son, that  Lafayette's  character,  after  allowance  has  been 
made  for  all  its  weaknesses,  must  be  regarded  as  that 
of  a  great  man.  Washington  was  a  well-nigh  unerring 
judge  of  character,  and  he  gave  to  Lafayette,  almost 
from  the  beginning,  a  confidence  which  was  the  basis 
of  a  rare  disinterested  friendship,  a  friendship  which 
continued  to  the  end.  It  was  no  weak  character  who 
turned  his  back  upon  all  the  luxury,  ease,  pleasure,  and 
honors  which  high  birth  and  position,  wealth  and  youth 


244  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI. 

could  give  ;  who  braved  the  displeasure  of  his  sovereign 
and  the  angry  sneers  of  his  kinsmen  to  share  the  hard- 
ships and  dangers  of  the  Continental  army,  to  starve 
and  freeze  at  Valley  Forge  with  Washington,  and  to 
participate  with  the  neglected  soldiers  of  the  Continen- 
tal army  in  what  must  have  appeared  to  the  sober-think- 
ing world  an  insane  struggle  against  hopeless  odds.  His 
tact  also  enabled  him  to  perform  as  great  service  in  the 
way  of  mediation  as  he  performed  by  his  sword.  He 
prevented  by  this  the  failure,  at  an  early  stage,  of  the 
American  alliance  with  France,  and  to  him  more  than 
to  any  other  was  due  the  gaining  of  the  needful  co- 
operation with  Washington  at  Yorktown  of  De  Grasse 
and  Rochambeau. 

On  the  whole,  we  must  admit  that  Lafayette  was  a 
high-minded  gentleman;  he  was  also  an  ambitious  gen- 
tleman, and  Carlyle's  term  of  "Cromwell-Grandison" 
is  not  unhappy.  We  must  bear  in  mind  that  he  was 
still  very  young,  that  he  had  been  a  great  success  in 
America,  that  he  was  also  a  great  success  in  Paris,  that 
he  was  deeply  imbued  with  principles  which,  for  the 
time  in  which  he  was  then  living,  were  extremely  ad- 
vanced, though  it  needed  but  the  turn  of  a  couple  of 
years  to  make  them  seem  exceedingly  reactionary.  In 
short,  he  was  an  honorable,  handsome,  self -conceited, 
eminently  well-meaning,  well-born  second-class  young 
man. 

Contemporary  evidence  is  always  interesting  if  it  is 
not  always  the  best:  let  us  see  what  shrewd,  simple 
English  Perry  says  of  Lafayette:  "The  Marquis  de  la 
Fayette,  as  he  was  then  called,  distinguished  himself 
much  at  this  time  for  his  opposition  to  the  arbitrary 
measures  of  the  court  and  its  ministers.  He  had  made 
seven  or  eight  campaigns  in  America,  much  to  his  rep- 


1787.  WHAT  PERRY    SAYS  OF  LAFAYETTE.  245 

utation  as  a  soldier;  he  had  also  spent  his  leisure  hours 
with  Washington,  Paine,  Schuyler,  and  others,  not  less 
to  his  honor  as  a  philosopher,  and  was  highly  esteemed 
by  them  all.  It  was  in  their  company  that  he  attem- 
pered the  fierceness  of  the  warrior  with  the  philanthropy 
of  the  man;  it  was  from  them  he  learned — for  he  was 
very  young — those  maxims  of  civil  polity  which  served 
as  the  groundwork  in  the  constitution  of  the  free  Amer- 
ican government,  and  which  were  one  day  to  be  dissem- 
inated among  his  compatriots  at  home.  He  returned  to 
France  a  conqueror,  and,  at  the  same  time,  a  polished 
gentleman  ;  he  spoke  our  language  fluently,  and  by 
that  means  could  converse  with  every  Englishman  re- 
siding in  his  metropolis  whose  knowledge  in  the  science 
of  government  might  make  him  a  desirable  companion. 
The  French  court  was  flattered  in  taking  to  itself  all 
the  honor  it  could  derive  from  claiming  this  promising 
young  man  as  one  of  its  choicest  subjects,  and  at  the 
same  time  entertained  many  well-founded  fears  that 
this  champion  in  the  American  cause  might  eventually 
prove  a  missionary  from  it  to  the  genius  of  French  lib- 
erty. Thus,  by  mixing  with  and  being  admired  by  all 
classes  of  his  countrymen,  he  taught  them  to  carol  songs 
to  reviving  freedom  instead  of  those  dirges  they  had  so 
lately  chanted  over  its  remains.  In  all  public  discourses 
or  debates  M.  de  la  Fayette  not  only  maintained  his  phil- 
osophical sentiments  of  the  question  upon  the  ground  of 
speculative  reason,  but  he  almost  constantly  introduced 
the  example  of  American  practice.  The  king,  under  all 
these  circumstances,  of  which  he  was  far  from  ignorant, 
nominated  La  Fayette,  with  considerable  reluctance,  to 
be  one  of  the  Notables.  He  prophetically  apprehended 
many  disappointments  to  his  views  by  such  nomination; 
but  to  leave  him  out  of  the  appointment  was  to  invite 


246 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI. 


other  ills  of  equal  magnitude  at  least,  and  much  more 
near. 

"  The  refractoriness  of  the  members  of  the  Notables 
was  ascribed  wholly  to  the  marquis;  and  as  the  Bastille 
at  this  time  was  in  being  and  in  fashion,  it  was  expected 
every  moment,  by  the  friends  of  the  marquis,  that  he 
would  be  sent  there  by  a  lettre  de  cachet.  He  never- 
theless persevered  with  spirit,  and  went  so  far  as  to  ac- 
cuse the  minister,  then  in  the  zenith  of  his  power,  with 
peculation  in  his  department ;  that  he  had  sold  crown 
lands  to  the  amount  of  two  millions  of  livres  without 
rendering  an  account  of  the  money,  or  even  showing 
that  he  had  had  the  king's  consent  to  dispose  of  them. 
This  was  like  taking  a  bull  by  the  horns;  and  the  friends 
of  the  marquis  trembled  for  the  issue  of  the  denuncia- 
tion. The  prince,  in  a  menacing  voice,  asked  La  Fay- 
ette  if  he  would  venture  to  put  the  accusation  in  writ- 
ing ;  to  which  he  immediately  answered,  '  Most  cer- 
tainly;' and  the  paper  was  carried  to  the  king,  and  oc- 
casioned, though  not  immediately,  that  very  minister's 
dismissal;  but  as  that  was  all  the  punishment  inflicted 
on  him,  it  was  shrewdly  suspected  that  the  queen  and 
her  party  knew  the  whole  transaction,  and  had  shared 
in  its  profits." 

But  if  he  had  been  ten  times  vainer  or  weaker  than 
he  was,  he  would  still  be  a  serious  player  in  this  great 
play,  if  only  for  the  sake  of  the  momentous  words  which 
he  uttered  in  the  Artois  Bureau  of  Notables,  and  which 
were,  as  it  were,  whistled  down  the  wind  that  blew  Ca- 
lonne  into  outer  darkness.  It  was  Lafayette  who  lifted 
up  his  voice  first  and  suggested  that  the  right  thing  to 
do  in  the  existing  crisis  was  to  convoke  the  States-Gen- 
eral. It  was  a  great  suggestion,  and  fraught  with  con- 
sequences which  had  not  entered  for  a  moment  into  the 


1727-87.  LOMEXIE  DE  BRIENNK.  247 

handsome  head  of  the  young  soldier  who  made  it.  Did 
Lafayette  ever,  we  may  wonder,  in  those  long  years  of 
life  which  were  yet  to  be  his,  and  in  which  the  French 
Revolution  was  to  be  but  an  episode,  did  he  ever  think 
upon  the  terrible  importance  of  the  suggestion  he  then 
made,  and  wish,  perhaps,  that  he  had  never  made  it? 
It  would  have  mattered  really  very  little  if  young  Amer- 
ican General  Lafayette  had  held  his  peace  on  that  mem- 
orable occasion.  The  words  had  to  be  said;  the  proposi- 
tion had  to  be  made.  If  Lafayette's  lips  had  not  framed 
the  words  they  would  have  been  framed  by  the  lips  of 
some  other.  But  the  first  person  who  actually  formu- 
lates the  desire  for  some  great  reform  deserves  recogni- 
tion and  honor,  if  only  for  being  the  happy  mouthpiece 
of  the  stirring  need  and  thought  of  the  hour.  Lafa- 
yette was  the  lucky  man  whom  chance  or  fate  appointed 
to  first  give  tongue  to  that  cry  for  the  States- General 
which  was  so  soon  to  resound  from  one  end  of  France 
to  the  other. 

Calonne's  successor  was  destined  to  prove  no  more 
successful  than  Calonne.  Lomenie  de  Brienne  had 
touched  the  top  of  his  ambition  only  to  prove  himself 
disastrously  unequal  to  it.  He  was  essentially  a  queen's 
man,  as  opposed  to  a  king's  man.  The  king  did  not  like 
him;  distrusted  him.  Had  not  the  king's  falher,  the  late 
dauphin,  written  down  Lomenie  de  Brienne  as  a  sceptic, 
even  an  atheist?  —  accusations  which  stuck  in  Louis's 
memory,  and  led  him  to  say,  when  De  Brienne's  name 
was  proposed  for  the  archbishopric  of  Paris,  "  Let  us 
have  at  least  an  archbishop  who  believes  in  God."  We 
have  no  means  of  knowing  what  Lomenie  de  Brienne 
did  or  did  not  believe  in,  but  he  certainly  belonged  to 
the  worse  rather  than  the  better  order  of  eighteenth- 
century  churchmen.  He  was  a  scholar,  in  his  way,  and 


248  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI 

liked  to  pose  as  a  thinker,  a  philosopher,  an  economist. 
A  child  of  the  Church,  he  affected  or  displayed  sympa- 
thy with  the  Encyclopaedists;  a  man  of  God,  he  loved 
to  act  as  a  brilliant  man  of  the  world.  Born  in  1727, 
he  was  now  fifty  years  old,  but  his  smooth,  femininely 
graceful  features  wore  still  something  of  the  air  of  youth. 
The  friend  of  the  Abbe  Vermond,  he  was  also  naturally 
the  friend  of  Marie  Antoinette.  He  had,  or  thought  he 
had,  the  art  of  pleasing  women,  as  he  thought  that  he  had 
the  art  of  governing  men.  His  own  profound  impres- 
sion had  helped  him  to  the  reputation  abroad,  for  what 
a  man  profoundly  believes  of  himself  he  can  often  get  an 
idle  world  very  willingly  to  believe  too.  Men  and  women 
of  the  Bull's  Eye  and  the  court  agreed  that  Lomenie  de 
Brienne  was  a  great  man,  a  wonderful  man.  The  queen 
thought  so  too,  and  so  he  became  minister. 

The  Notables,  called  into  existence  in  a  vague,  un- 
meaning kind  of  way,  were  destined  to  vanish  out  of 
existence  as  an  organized  body  after  a  scarcely  less 
vague  and  unmeaning  fashion.  Lomenie  de  Brienne 
considered  that  he  could  set  about  his  great  task  of 
regenerating  France  very  much  better  without  their 
assistance.  It  seemed  to  his  thin  intelligence  that  they 
were  beginning  to  meddle  too  much  with  things  out  of 
their  star.  A  Lafayette  demanding  States-General,  and 
generally  obtruding  himself  in  a  reforming  attitude,  a 
Duke  de  la  Rochefoucauld  sneering  at  tithes,  a  king's 
brother,  Count  de  Provence,  describing  the  gabelle  as 
an  "infernal  machine,"  all  this  was  very  unbecoming, 
not  to  say  unpleasant.  So  Lomenie  de  Brienne  thought 
that  the  best  thing  he  could  do  was  to  dismiss  them 
with  all  decent  courtesy.  This  he  accordingly  did  after 
delivering  to  them  one  of  the  most  astonishing  speeches 
ever  made  by  minister  chosen  of  men,  in  which  he  grave- 


im.  THE  NOTABLES  DISBANDED.  249 

ly  thanked  them  for  having  established  the  existence  of 
a  deficit  of  forty  millions  in  the  national  exchequer.  It 
was  hardly  worth  calling  the  Notables  together  to  estab- 
lish what  must  have  been  already  painfully  familiar  to 
any  finance  minister.  However,  Lomenie  had  to  thank 
his  Notables  for  something,  so  he  thanked  them  for  that, 
and  for  their  other  suggestions — to  be  accepted  or  not 
as  the  case  might  be — and  so  bowed  them  out  of  Ver- 
sailles and  away  to  the  four  corners  of  France,  every 
single  member  of  the  thus  disbanded  Notables  carrying 
with  him  to  his  own  home,  no  matter  what  his  own 
principles,  the  seeds  of  agitation,  of  disaffection,  of  revo- 
lution. If  Calonne  had  wanted  to  precipitate  the  course 
of  the  Revolution  he  could  not  have  hit  upon  a  better 
plan  than  this  of  the  Notables.  It  gave  the  country, 
as  a  whole,  its  first  jog  ;  put  into  the  minds  of  plethoric 
towns  and  sleepy  parishes  far  away  the  idea  of  delega- 
tion, of  a  national  voice  which  might  have  its  word  to 
say.  If  the  Notables,  who  had  not  been  summoned  for 
a  century  and  a  half,  might  thus  be  brought  together 
to  express,  as  it  were,  the  opinion  upon  things  in  gen- 
eral of  the  surface  of  the  body  politic,  why  should  not 
the  States-General  be  summoned  to  express  opinions 
upon  things  in  general  which  should  go  below  the  sur- 
face, go  as  low  as  the  Third  Estate  ?  Such  were  the 
questions  which  the  dispersal  of  the  Notables  set  people 
asking  each  other  in  every  part  of  France  in  the  early 
summer  of  the  year  1787. 

Lafayette,  writing  to  his  friend  Jay  in  America  in 
this  May  of  1787,  said  that  the  Assembly  of  Notables 
had  given  the  country  "  the  habit  of  thinking  about 
public  affairs,"  and  the  phrase  sums  up  the  situation 
with  sufficient  dexterity.  The  patriotism  of  the  Nota- 
bles, as  a  whole,  does  not  appear  very  brilliant  in  the 


250  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVI. 

eyes  of  the  later  generations,  but  for  its  time  it  was  pos- 
itively dazzling.  The  men  who  overthrew  Calonne,  who 
reproached  Brienne  for  want  of  faith,  who  refused  to 
vote  imposts,  who  talked  of  States-General,  and  nick- 
named the  gabelle  an  "infernal  machine,"  were  men 
who  at  least  proved,  in  words  written  at  the  time,  that 
"  the  nation  still  existed ;"  and  to  have  proved  so  much 
was  to  have  given  a  very  good  reason  for  gratitude. 
Lomenie  de  Brienne  began  to  find  that  he  had  not  gained 
much  by  his  polite  dismissal  of  the  Notables.  His  task 
of  regenerating  France,  of  filling  up  that  fatal  deficit, 
was  as  difficult,  as  desperate  as  ever.  He  was  still  face 
to  face  with  antagonism ;  it  was  only  the  antagonists 
who  were  different.  Lomenie  de  Brienne  found  himself 
engaged  in  that  fight  with  the  Paris  Parliament  which 
was  to  make  him,  after  a  fashion,  famous. 


1789.  THE  PARIS  PARLIAMENT.  251 


CHAPTER  XVII. 

THE    BRIENNE    ILIAD. 

LOMENIE  DE  BRIENNE  had  got  a  bitter  business  in 
hand.  It  would  have  needed  a  political  Hercules  to 
grapple  with  the  Hydra  Parliament,  and  Lomenie  was 
no  Hercules.  Things  were  not  as  they  once  were  ;  gov- 
ernment by  lettre  de  cachet  was  drifting  to  its  doom  ;  a 
parliament  flushed  by  its  late  delight  in  trying  a  car- 
dinal, in  almost  trying  a  queen,  was  in  a  decidedly  dem- 
ocratic mood,  more  inclined  to  run  counter  to  courtly 
wishes  than  it  had  ever  been  in  the  days  when  the  Jan- 
senist-Jesuit  feud  was  raging  and  the  Bull  Unigenitus 
of  the  one  party  was  the  red  rag  of  the  other. 

We  have  already  seen  that  the  Parliaments  played 
their  part  in  the  expression  of  opposition  to  royal  will. 
Let  us,  however,  examine  the  petition  of  the  Paris  Par- 
liament before  we  enter  into  the  Brienne  Iliad.  What 
was  the  actual  method  by  which  government  was  ad- 
ministered in  the  year  1789  ?  An  absolute  monarchy  to 
begin  with.  Louis  XV.  had  asserted  with  the  uncom- 
promising directness  of  a  deluge-discerning  king  the 
unquestionable,  unimpeachable  authority  of  the  king  as 
law-maker.  But  even  the  royal  will  was  not  brusquely 
promulgated  without  any  decent  appearance  of  consul- 
tation. Even  the  impetuous  sultans  of  Arabian  tales 
have  their  grand  viziers  whose  opinion  they  invite,  lis- 
ten to  with  courtesy,  and  even  occasionally  follow.  The 
princes  of  the  House  of  Valois,  the  kings  of  the  seed  of 


252  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVlL 

Capet,  found  their  counsellors  in  the  Paris  Parliament. 
The  Parliament  of  Paris  came  into  being  in  the  four- 
teenth century.  The  despotic  sovereigns  of  the  four- 
teenth century  had  a  Grand  Council  with  whom  they 
settled  political  questions,  and  a  Chamber  of  Accounts 
with  whom  they  discussed  grave  questions  of  finance, 
and  they  had  their  Paris  Parliament  with  its  three 
divisions — Great  Chamber,  Chamber  of  Enquiries,  and 
Chamber  of  Requests — with  whom  they  were  pleased 
to  consult  before  administering  justice.  Within  a  very 
short  time  the  Paris  Parliament,  as  was  but  natural, 
increased  in  power  and  in  authority.  It  was  allowed  to 
administer  justice  by  itself,  though  always,  of  course, 
with  the  royal  sanction,  and,  occasionally,  presumed  so 
far  upon  its  position  as  to  argue,  and  pretty  roundly 
too,  with  the  king.  When  the  argument  got  too  warm 
for  the  kingly  patience,  the  king  had  always  a  trump 
card  to  play.  He  had  only  to  come  down  in  person  to 
his  faithful  but  slightly  aggressive  parliament,  and  hold 
what  was  called  a  Bed  of  Justice  in  its  presence,  in  order 
to  compel  them  to  accede  to  any  edict  he  had  framed. 
But  this  was  a  kind  of  trump  card  which  the  king  did 
not  always  care  to  play.  There  are  some  victories  that 
are  too  costly  to  win,  and  the  Bed  of  Justice  always  left 
such  a  train  of  irritation  behind  it  that  the  kings,  as  a 
rule,  found  it  but  an  uneasy  couch.  Step  by  step,  and 
inch  by  inch,  the  Parliament  of  Paris  grew  in  dignity, 
grew  in  authority.  Louis  XI.,  with  that  keen  eye  for 
the  main  chance  which  at  times  made  him  politically 
shortsighted,  made  the  councillors  over  the  Paris  Par- 
liament irremovable,  except  in  case  of  condemnation  for 
high-treason.  By  this  arrangement  Louis  made  a  seat 
in  the  Paris  Parliament  a  valuable  marketable  article, 
which  he  always  disposed  of  to  the  highest  bidder.  Un- 


1515-1774.  THE   PARIS   PARLIAMENT.  253 

der  Francis  I.  and  his  successors,  the  Parliament  throve, 
and  it  was  not  until  the  advent  of  Richelieu  that  it  en- 
countered any  serious  check  in  its  career  of  increase. 
But  Richelieu  made  as  light  of  it  as  he  made  light  of 
all  orders  and  all  institutions,  all  men  and  all  things, 
which  stood  in  his  imperious  way,  and  the  policy  of  the 
Great  Minister  was  inherited  by  the  Great  Monarch.  It 
was  in  Louis  XV.,  in  Louis  the  Well-beloved,  however, 
that  the  Parliament  found  its  most  aggressive,  most  act- 
ive enemy.  The  Well-beloved  was  a  parliament-hater 
arid  a  parliament-hunter.  He  thought  nothing  of  send- 
ing a  whole  parliament  to  the  right-about.  He  exiled 
it  from  Paris  in  1753,  though  he  consented  to  the  sup- 
pression of  its  enemies,  the  Jesuits,  in  1762  ;  and  in  1770, 
on  the  advice  of  Maupeou,  he  abolished  the  old  Parlia- 
ment altogether,  and  established  the  Parliament  Mau- 
peou. Louis  XVI.,  whose  good  deeds  generally  did  him 
harm,  had  on  his  accession  recalled  the  former  council- 
lors, and  Lomenie  de  Brienne  was  now  to  find  that  their 
spirit  was  as  stiff-necked  as  ever,  and  that  they  would 
not  be  satisfied  to  register  the  royal  edicts  without  dis- 
cussing them,  as  they  had  done  in  the  days  of  the  Sun- 
King.  The  Parliament  of  Paris  was  further  strength- 
ened in  the  country  by  the  existence  of  twelve  provincial 
parliaments  in  the  chief  provinces.  These  provincial 
parliaments  at  Toulouse,  Grenoble,  Bordeaux,  Dijon, 
Pau,  Metz,  Besangon,'  Douai,  Rouen,  Aix,  Rennes,  and 
Nancy,  though  they  had  no  actual  connection  with  the 
Parliament  of  Paris,  invariably  made  common  cause 
with  it  in  all  its  struggles  with  the  crown. 

The  Parliaments,  which  ranked  first  of  the  Supreme 
Courts,  above  the  Courts  of  Accounts  and  the  Courts  of 
Excise  and  Exchequer,  never  missed  an  opportunity  of 
insisting  upon  their  supremacy.  They  maintained  per- 


254  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVII. 

manent  rivalry  with  the  High  Council  and  those  other 
councils  and  ministries  which,  ranking  immediately 
after  the  royal  authority,  had  under  their  jurisdiction 
not  only  the  Supreme  Courts,  but  also  all  the  civil  and 
ecclesiastical  tribunals.  They  strove  to  maintain  their 
ancient  privileges,  and  to  assert  their  political  predom- 
inance, which  they  had  first  definitely  gained  when,  after 
the  troubled  days  of  Chai-les  VI.,  they  had  succeeded  in 
converting  their  right  of  registration  into  the  widely 
differing  and  far  more  powerful  right  of  verification. 
The  Paris  Parliament  was  the  first,  as  it  was  the  oldest 
and  most  illustrious,  of  the  French  Parliaments.  It 
claimed  to  be  the  delegate  of  a  portion  of  the  sovereign 
power,  and  was  convinced  that  upon  its  existence  de- 
pended that  of  the  crown,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the 
king  had  for  many  years  ceased  to  consult  it  upon  ques- 
tions of  government.  To  this  Parliament  the  princes 
of  the  blood,  the  five  classes  of  the  peers  of  France,  the 
six  ecclesiastical  peers,  the  chancellor  and  the  keeper  of 
the  seals,  were  admitted,  with  the  right  of  speaking. 
It  was  composed  of  a  first  president,  several  junior 
presidents,  several  honorary  councillors,  and  four  royal 
masters  of  requests-in-ordinary ;  of  two  hundred  and 
thirty-two  councillors,  a  procureur-general,  and  three 
advocates-general.  These  officers  of  the  highest  rank 
were  disseminated  among  four  groups  of  chambers — 
the  Grand  Chamber,  which  judge'd  all  the  chief  cases; 
the  three  Chambers  of  Inquests,  the  Chamber  of  Re- 
quests, and  a  chamber  for  criminal  cases  called  La 
Tournelle.  The  Grand  Chamber  only  took  cognizance 
of  those  criminal  processes  which  concerned  gentlemen 
and  state  personages,  such  as  ministers  or  other  high 
government  officials.  The  duties  of  the  Grand  Cham- 
ber, the  other  chambers,  and  the  Criminal  Chamber 


l-iS7.  MEN  OF  THE  ROBE.  255 

also  necessitated  the  creation  of  a  certain  number  of 
officials  of  lower  rank. 

It  has  been  estimated  that  more  than  forty  thousand 
persons  were  employed  in  the  various  courts  of  judica- 
ture, from  the  president-d-mortier  down  to  the  humble 
writ-server.  To  this  large  number  of  persons,  who 
peopled  the  law-courts  and  formed  what  was  called  the 
Robe,  must  be  added  a  host  of  subordinate  agents  and 
satellites,  from  the  verger  to  the  crier  and  the  man  who 
posted  up  the  decrees.  This  little  host  of  legal  satel- 
lites formed  a  population  apart  from  the  rest  of  the 
nation.  They  looked  upon  themselves  as  possessing  a 
certain  share  of  legal  power ;  a  fact  which  made  them 
accept  all  the  more  blindly,  not  only  the  orders  of  their 
immediate  superiors,  but  the  influences  of  the  Parlia- 
ments, more  especially  that  of  Paris.  The  Parliaments, 
having  control  over  so  many  persons  and  opinions,  al- 
ways possessed  a  decided  authority,  even  under  Louis 
XIV.,  who  had  limited  their  power  to  the  administra- 
tion of  justice.  They  were  confident  of  recovering  their 
former  preponderance  as  soon  as  they  could  resume  their 
political  functions,  and  this  was  their  constant  aim 
throughout  the  course  of  the  eighteenth  century.  There 
had,  for  a  long  time,  been  a  bitter  rivalry  between  the 
court  and  the  Men  of  the  Robe,  between  the  nobles  and 
the  parliamentary  class.  The  latter,  it  is  true,  acquired, 
by  reason  of  their  profession,  an  official  nobility  which 
brought  them  certain  honorary  prerogatives,  but  which 
did  not  put  them  on  a  level  with  the  nobility  by  birth. 
Thus  this  semi-nobility  often  served  to  increase  the  irri- 
tation of  the  haughtiest  members  of  the  Parliamentary 
class  against  the  ancient  nobility. 

The  nobility  of  the  long  robe  kept  aloof  from  the 
court  through  envy,  from  the  higher  bourgeoisie  through 


256  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVH. 

disdain,  even  from  the  members  of  the  financial  pro- 
fession, though  that  had  close  affinity  with  theirs,  con- 
sidering that  all  magisterial  posts  went  by  purchase. 
Evil  and  astonishing  though  this  system  of  purchase 
seems,  it  was  not  an  entire  evil.  If  it  was  a  choice 
between  a  body  nominated  entirely  by  a  monarch,  a 
mere  shadow  of  authority,  and  a  body  which  had  at 
least  purchased  a  right  to  a  certain  individual  inde- 
pendence, then  undoubtedly,  of  the  two  evils,  the  na- 
tion preferred  the  latter.  The  value  of  the  post  of 
councillor  rose  or  fell  like  the  value  of  real  estate.  One 
of  these  posts,  which  fetched  only  from  twenty-five 
thousand  to  thirty  thousand  livres  in  1712,  when  the 
Parliament  merely  administered  justice,  was  worth 
double  the  latter  sum  in  1747,  when  Parliament  insisted 
upon  being  recognized  as  a  political  body.  The  emolu- 
ments varied  very  much,  according  to  the  amount  of 
work  undertaken  by  each  member  of  the  Parliament, 
and  also  according  to  the  value  which  he  set  on  them. 
When  this  was  very  high,  it  made  the  fees  fall  very 
heavily  upon  litigants  ;  for  the  law-suits,  at  that  time, 
were  accompanied  by  a  thousand  minute  formalities 
which,  by  making  them  extend  over  a  long  period,  mul- 
tiplied the  costs. 

The  very  excellent  Bibliophile  Jacob  paints  a  curious 
picture  of  the  way  in  which  the  Parliamentary  families 
formed,  in  the  midst  of  French  society,  a  society  apart, 
which  had  few  relations  with  other  classes.  This  so- 
ciety, which  was  a  complete  corporation  in  itself,  con- 
sisted of  different  groups  extending  upwards,  in  ac- 
cordance with  their  origin,  fortune,  and  position,  from 
the  humblest  employments  to  the  highest  posts  of  the 
judicature.  Every  new-comer  who  had  purchased  an 
office,  at  once  became  an  integral  part  of  the  associa- 


1787.  PARLIAMENTARY  FAMILIES.  257 

tion,  and  henceforward  obtained  naturalization  into  the 
long  robe,  breaking  off,  in  a  manner  of  speaking,  all 
family  ties.  Parliamentary  society  had  always  been 
notorious  for  its  gravity  and  severity,  its  formality, 
its  pride  and  hauteur.  Eschewing  fetes,  balls,  concerts, 
and  theatricals,  it  was  renowned  for  its  dinners.  These 
were  followed  by  some  discussion  on  matters  of  juris- 
prudence, or  some  quiet  game  of  cards,  and  the  com- 
pany always  separated  early,  for  the  magistrates  were 
in  the  habit  of  rising  before  daybreak.  The  interior 
of  their  houses,  with  large  .stone  staircases,  wide  vesti- 
bules, and  richly  decorated  reception-rooms,  was  in 
keeping  with  their  character  for  gloom  and  severity, 
and  the  very  servants  seemed  redolent  of  the  law-courts. 
Their  masters  rarely  smiled,  and  assumed  a  solemn  gait, 
and  a  majestic,  not  to  say  unamiable  exterior.  The 
ladies  of  the  long  robe,  who  mixed  only  with  their 
peers,  were  said  to  have  no  knowledge  of  social  usages, 
or  to  have  very  inaccurate  knowledge.  They  were  said 
to  be  wedded  to  formality,  and  to  have  envy  and  hatred 
for  their  only  occupation.  It  must  be  said  in  their  ex- 
cuse that  they  only  appeared  in  public  at  the  ceremo- 
nies of  the  Parliaments  and  the  sovereign  court,  and  it 
was  on  these  occasions  that  they  imbibed  the  taste  for 
the  minute  and  unbending  formalities  observed  by  the 
"robins,"  as  the  nobility  contemptuously  nicknamed 
the  Men  of  the  Robe.  The  number  of  bows  and  their 
character,  from  the  reverence  en  dame  to  the  mere  in- 
clination of  the  head,  were  all  regulated  by  a  law  of 
etiquette  as  complicated  and  as  rigorous  as  that  which 
prevailed  at  court. 

It  is  hardly  surprising  that  such  a  body,  so  consti- 
tuted, should  have  inspired  an  almost  religious  respect, 
in  spite  of  the  faults  committed  by  individual  members. 
I.— 17 


258  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XVII. 

This  respect  was  never  more  strongly  displayed  than 
on  solemn  occasions  such  as  that  described  by  Barbier 
in  his  journal.  A  formal  procession  of  the  sovereign 
courts,  in  their  state  robes,  was  sufficiently  impressive, 
with  its  presidents,  councillors,  advocates-general,  pro- 
cureurs-general,  registrars  and  secretaries  of  the  court 
wearing  the  scarlet-robe,  some  with  the  mortar-cap  of 
black  velvet,  and  others  with  the  red  hood  trimmed 
with  ermine ;  with  its  officers  of  the  Court  of  Accounts 
in  black  robes  of  velvet,  satin,  damask,  or  satin  ;  its 
officers  of  the  Court  of  Excise  in  black  velvet  robes  with 
black  hood ;  its  officials  of  the  Court  of  Exchequer  in 
red  robes  with  ermine  hood,  and,  following  them,  all 
the  judicial  bodies  appertaining  to  the  Parliament,  each 
with  their  respective  costumes  and  insignia,  and  taking 
precedence  according  to  their  rank. 

The  Paris  Parliament,  in  fighting  mood,  refused  to 
register  the  Stamp  Tax  and  Land  Tax  which  Lomenie 
in  his  desperate  mood  had  thrust  before  them.  It  did 
not  remain  content  with  an  attitude  of  mere  opposition. 
It  fermented  with  demands  and  protests.  It  set  all 
Paris  fermenting  around  it.  It  became  in  its  turn  ag- 
gressive. It  insisted  upon  being  furnished  with  "  states 
of  the  finances,"  a  demand  which  led  to  the  ominous 
joke  of  the  Abbe  Sabathier,  "  It  is  not  States  of  the 
Finances,  but  States-General,  that  we  want,  gentlemen." 
Lafayette's  demand,  which  startled  D'Artois,  thus  echoed 
by  Abbe  Sabathier,  and  startling  D'Ormesson,  was  be- 
coming the  watchword  and  the  catchword  of  the  hour. 
A  Parliament  that  refused  to  register,  and  that  talked 
about  States-General,  began  to  tell  upon  Lomenie's 
nerves.  He  lost  his  head,  and  imagining,  as  such  weak 
things  are  given  to  imagining,  that  he  was  a  strong  man, 
he  resolved  upon -strong  measures.  After  a  month  of 


1787  THE  PARIS  PARLIAMENT  EXILED.  259 

waiting  and  of  wrangling,  the  king,  prompted  by  Lorae- 
nie,  brought  the  old  crazy  machinery  of  a  Bed  of  Jus- 
tice into  play,  and  solemnly  ordered  his  Parliament, 
transported  to  Versailles  for  the  purpose,  to  do  the  royal 
bidding.  Never  had  a  Bed  of  Justice  failed  before  ;  but 
this  time  under  weak  Lomenie's  auspices  it  did  fail. 
No  sooner  had  the  Parliament  returned  to  Paris,  than 
it  annulled  the  events  of  the  previous  day,  and  treated 
the  Bed  of  Justice  as  a  thing  of  naught.  Hereupon 
Lomenie,  now  desperate,  tried  again  his  part  of  strong 
man.  He  issued  the  requisite  number  of  lettres  de  cachet, 
and  sent  the  whole  Parliament  into  exile  in  Troyes,  in 
Champagne.  Life  was  dull  at  Troyes  in  Champagne 
for  an  exiled,  if  heroic,  Parliament,  thus  standing  in  a 
corner  like  a  naughty  child.  A  compromise  was  arrived 
at.  The  Parliament  agreed  to  register  an  edict  for  the 
collection  of  a  tax  to  be  levied  on  all  property  alike, 
and  in  the  pleasant  late  September  days  they  came  back 
to  Paris  and  popular  applause.  Paris  had  been  in  a 
wild  condition  without  its  beloved  Parliament,  seditious, 
tumultuous,  noisy,  even  assailing,  with  intent  to  do  bod- 
ily mischief  to,  the  person  of  the  king's  royal  and  un- 
popular brother  Artois,  whom  we  can  still  see  after  all 
these  years  in  a  familiar  print  protected  from  an  irri- 
table populace  by  the  bayonets  of  the  Guards.  Who 
could  guess  that  the  time  was  so  very  nigh  when  the 
irritable  people  would  be  less  easily  repelled  by  those 
bayonets?  when  those  bayonets  would  be  less  ready  to 
repel  them? 

In  the  dull  November  days  Lomenie  found  himself 
once  more  at  his  wit's  end.  Like  the  London  Lack- 
penny  in  Lydgate's  poem,  for  lack  of  money  he  could 
not  speed,  so  he  had  to  come  again  to  the  Parliament 
to  ask  for  a  registration  of  an  edict  for  raising  large 


260 


THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVII. 


loans  for  a  term  of  five  years,  and  holding  out  dim 
hopes  of  States-General  as  a  bribe.  It  was  an  eventful 
day.  The  king  came  with  Lomenie,  the  king  and  all 
his  court;  but  the  royal  presence  did  not  render  the 
Parliament  the  more  tractable.  It  argued  away  for  six 
hours  steadily ;  then  when  the  king,  pushed  beyond  his 
patience,  insisted  upon  the  edicts  being  registered,  sud- 
denly a  new  champion  of  the  Parliament,  a  new  antago- 
nist of  the  court,  loomed  into  historic  sight  astonish- 
ingly. From  the  place  where  he  sat,  the  Duke  d'Orleans 
rose  after  the  imperative  demand  of  the  king,  and 
asked  if  the  occasion  were  a  royal  session  or  a  Bed  of 
Justice. 

This  was  mischievous,  but  there  was  more  mischief 
to  come.  For  Louis,  promptly  converting  the  session 
into  a  Bed  of  Justice,  ordered  the  immediate  registra- 
tion of  the  edicts,  and,  while  the  Parliament  was  wait- 
ing to  take  its  vote,  the  keeper  of  the  seals  gravely 
announced  that  the  registration  must  take  place.  There- 
upon D'Orleans  again  pushed  himself  to  the  front.  "  Sire," 
he  said,  "  I  entreat  your  majesty  to  permit  me  to  place 
at  your  feet,  and  in  the  heart  of  this  court,  the  declara- 
tion that  I  regard  this  registration  as  illegal,  and  that 
it  is  necessary  for  the  justification  of  those  who  have 
taken  part  in  these  deliberations  to  add  that  it  has  taken 
place  by  the  express  command  of  the  king."  The  angry 
king  replied  that  the  registration  was  legal,  and  marched 
out  of  the  place.  The  Duke  d'Orleans  brought  him  on 
his  way  to  the  door,  and  then  returned  full  of  his  new 
heroic  mood  to  record  his  protest  against  the  illegal 
registrations.  So,  for  the  first  time,  D'Orleans  appeared 
in  any  serious  way  upon  the  great  stage  of  events.  He 
will  appear  again  often  and  ominously  enough.  This 
was  his  first  taste  of  rebellion.  The  next  day  a  lettre 


1787.  ORLEANS  EXILED.  261 

de  cachet  sent  him  off  to  exile  in  his  estate  at  Raincy. 
The  Parliamentarians  Duval,  Sabathier  who  wanted 
States-General,  Freteau,  and  Robert  shared  in  his  dis- 
grace. This  was,  as  we  have  said,  Orleans'  first  serious 
appearance  before  the  world.  Let  us  see  what  the  new 
patriot  was  like. 


262  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVIII. 


CHAPTER  XVIIL 

EQUALITY    ORLEANS. 

A  REPULSIVE  creature,  with  a  blotched  and  pustuled 
face  and  body,  lethargic  from  premature,  long-sustained 
debauch,  was,  for  the  moment,  the  hero  of  agitation 
against  the  court.  Louis  Philippe  Joseph,  Duke  of  Or- 
leans, had  ingeniously  contrived  of  late  years  to  sur- 
round his  disagreeable  identity  with  an  attractive  le- 
gend. To  the  public  at  large  he  was  soon  to  be  Phi- 
lippe £galite,  Philip  Equality,  Equality  Orleans,  soon 
to  be  associated  with  the  new  democratic  movement,  to 
be  avouched  an  enemy  of  the  Old  Order  and  all  its  ways. 
Intelligent  scribes  and  energetic  draughtsmen  devoted 
their  pens  and  their  gravers  to  the  service  of  their  lord. 
He  was  represented  as  a  pattern  of  august  benevolence, 
the  true  friend  of  the  people,  the  zealous  antagonist  of 
a  profligate  and  oppressive  court.  He  was  even  held 
up  to  emulation  as  a  model  of  chivalrous  courage  and 
daring.  Did  he  not  on  one  occasion,  when  travelling 
in  the  country,  get  upset  with  carriage,  horses,  and 
servants  into  a  stream  ?  And  did  not  he,  while  saving 
himself  by  swimming,  actually  condescend  to  call  out 
to  his  struggling  valet  to  cling  to  the  boughs  of  a  tree, 
from  which  in  due  time  his  master  rescued  him  ?  That 
a  noble  should  so  far  unbend  as  to  recognize  that  the 
life  of  a  jack-servant  was  worth  saving  was  a  circum- 
stance so  remarkable  that  it  called  for  and  received  all 
the  honors  of  pictorial  celebration.  To  the  Parisian 


1747-87.  LOUIS   PHILIPPE'S  PARENTS.  263 

mob,  slowly  quickening  into  a  sense  of  its  democratic 
importance,  Equality  Orleans  became  a  sort  of  popular 
Bayard,  without  fear  and  without  reproach. 

Paris  had  not  always  regarded  Equality  Orleans  in 
this  way,  however.  The  record  of  his  still  brief  career 
was  not  always  written  in  such  gracious  characters. 
At  one  time  he  was  regarded,  not  without  justice,  as 
the  crown,  if  the  term  may  be  used  in  such  connec- 
tion— as  the  crown  of  the  matchless  corruption  of  the 
age.  He  was  born  on  April  13,  1747,  at  Saint-Cloud  ; 
thus  he  was  only  forty  years  old  at  the  time  of  his 
question  about  the  Bed  of  Justice.  His  father  was 
Philip  Louis  d'Orleans,  familiarly  knowrn  to  history  as 
Fat  Philip.  It  was  hardly  to  be  expected  that  much 
good  could  come  of  such  a  parentage.  Fat  Philip  was 
one  of  the  most  debauched  men  of  his  age,  which  is 
saying  much — a  kind  of  brutal  Falstaff  conceived  by 
Plautus  and  drawn  by  Callot  ;  cynical,  vicious,  gro- 
tesque, coarsely  immoral,  as  enormous  a  feeder  as  the 
gluttonous  Trimalcio  of  Petronius.  But  if  strange 
stories  were  told  of  Fat  Philip,  stranger  still  were  told 
and  credited  about  his  duchess.  She  was  accused  of 
the  most  amazing,  the  most  reckless  profligacy  ;  she  was 
seriously  believed  by  no  small  number  of  persons  to 
have  conserved  her  beauty  and  her  health  by  baths  of 
human  blood. 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  for  us  to  pay  much  heed  to 
these  blood-baths  and  the  like.  The  blood-bath  is  an 
old  friend  in  historical  fiction,  cropping  up  again  and 
again  whenever  popular  passion  wants  some  fresh  stone 
to  throw  at  one  of  its  butts.  All  the  scandals  of  that 
most  scandalous  age  have  to  be  taken  with  grave  and 
great  allowances.  The  age  was  corrupt,  indeed,  with- 
out its  being  necessary  for  us  to  admit  that  all  the  pict- 


234  TOE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVIII. 

ures  of  its  corruption  are  faithful,  austere,  unexagger- 
ated.  A  man  might  be  bad,  abominably  bad,  a  woman 
might  be  wicked,  even  vile  enough,  without  deserving 
all  the  opprobrium  of  popular  report  and  chroniques 
scandaleuses.  But  it  must  be  admitted  that  the  fact 
that  the  blood-bath  story  could  spring  up  at  all,  could 
gain  any  kind  of  credence — and  it  was  in  some  quar- 
ters most  religiously  believed — does  throw  its  light 
upon  the  character  of  the  Duchess  of  Orleans  who 
brought  forth  Philip  Equality.  The  police  of  the  time 
were  accused  of  pandering  to  her  terrible  taste  by  car- 
rying off  the  children  of  vagabonds  and  beggars  and 
sacrificing  them  to  this  new  Moloch.  But  even  if  this 
gravest  accusation  glances  off,  too  monstrous  for  belief, 
other  accusations  enough  and  to  spare  arraign  her.  She 
was  conspicuous  in  a  lascivious  and  a  lustful  age  for  her 
lasciviousness  and  for  her  lust.  Dissolute,  cynical,  and 
depraved,  she  lived  like  some  grotesque  survival  of  the 
decomposing  Roman  empire  ;  dissolute,  cynical,  and  de- 
praved, she  died.  Of  such  a  sire  and  such  a  dam  it 
would  be  hard  to  expect  a  noble  breed. 

We  are  told  that  the  birth  of  Philip  Equality  caused  his 
mother  terrible  suffering,  and  we  are  invited  by  the  su- 
perstitious to  see  in  these  circumstances  something  of  that 
prophetic  pain  which  should  accompany  the  birth  of  mon- 
sters like  Nero  and  monsters  like  Philip  Equality.  We 
learn,  however,  that  the  child  born  of  such  bitter  travail 
was  comely  enough  to  delight  the  wicked  old  hearts  of 
his  parents  ;  and  when  at  first  it  was  feared  that  his 
health  was  feeble,  the  grim  duke  and  duchess  were  ter- 
ribly afflicted.  However,  the  young  Louis  Philippe  Jo- 
seph did  live.  His  education  was  not  of  a  kind  that 
turns  out  an  estimable  nobility.  His  early  years  were 
left  to  his  mother's  care,  and  were  passed  in  the  midst  of 


174Y-8T.  LIKE  FATHER,  LIKE  SON.  265 

the  curious  and  corrupt  society  which  she  gathered  about 
her.  His  nature,  never  a  very  strong  one,  was  easily 
influenced  in  the  impi-essionable  hours  of  childhood  ; 
and,  unhappily  for  the  young  prince,  the  influences  to 
which  his  rising  manhood  were  especially  exposed,  and  to 
which  he  readily  yielded,  were  of  the  most  unfortunate 
kind.  While  we  make  all  possible  allowances  for  the 
exaggerations  of  pamphleteers,  the  scurrility  of  scan- 
dalous lampoons,  the  exigencies  of  the  compilers  of 
gossip  and  the  tellers  of  strange  tales,  it  is  still  impos- 
sible to  deny  that  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  was  one  of 
the  very  worst  that  ever  stained  the  history  of  a  royal 
race.  We  must  recognize,  too,  that  the  nature  would 
have  to  be  very  strong,  the  instincts  for  good  very  vi- 
tal and  very  deeply  implanted,  to  allow  a  young  man 
brought  up  in  the  influence  of  such  a  court  to  escape 
from  its  contamination.  Under  the  cynical  guidance 
of  his  father  he  was  early  initiated  into  all  the  evils  of 
the  day.  The  tastes  of  the  father  were  not  unnaturally 
the  tastes  of  the  son.  If  the  father  had  an  itch  for  vil- 
lainous society,  the  son  was  of  a  like  mind.  All  that  was 
worst  among  the  youth  of  the  worst  court  in  Europe 
rallied  round  the  son,  as  their  sires  had  rallied  round 
the  father.  He  reeled  from  dissipation  to  dissipation  in 
a  desperate,  incoherent  determination  to  be  the  fore- 
most of  that  wild  brotherhood.  In  the  dawn  of  his 
manhood  he  had  promised  a  fair  presence.  He  was 
above  the  middle  height  ;  he  carried  himself  well ;  his 
teeth  were  good,  his  skin  unusually  white  and  fine.  If 
his  features  were  feeble,  they  were  regular  and  cleanly 
cut  ;  his  lips  habitually  wore  a  smile  ;  his  blue  eyes 
seemed  to  regard  the  world  with  a  languid  interest, 
though  sometimes  we  are  told  that  they  could  glitter  as 
dangerously  as  those  of  a  hyena.  The  famous  "hell- 


266  THE  FRENCH  KEVoLtfTlOtf.  OH.  XVIII. 

fire  "  flash,  which  has  yet  to  be  recorded,  could  occa- 
sionally gleam  there  in  the  days  when  Philip  Equality 
was  only  the  handsome  Duke  de  Chartres,  who  knew 
nothing  of  Dame  de  Buffon,  nor  dreamed  of  Dr.  Guil- 
lotin.  He  danced  well,  fenced  well,  swam  well  ;  bore 
himself  well,  indeed,  in  most  bodily  exercises.  The  ac- 
counts of  his  early  manhood  present  a  sufficiently  pleas- 
ing picture  of  a  personable  young  prince.  But  the  ex- 
cesses to  which  he  delivered  himself  without  rhyme  or 
reason  soon  marred  his  comely  presence.  Crapulous  de- 
bauchery starred  his  discolored  visage  with  pimples, 
blotches,  and  unwholesome  growths,  till  his  enemies 
declared  that  he  resembled  Sulla,  whom  the  Athenians 
likened  to  a  mulberry  sprinkled  with  flour.  His  hair 
fell,  leaving  him  ignobly  bald,  and  driving  the  young 
courtiers  who  surrounded  him  to  depilate  their  own 
foreheads  in  the  sycophantic  effort  to  keep  him  in 
countenance,  and  to  make  ignoble  baldness  fashion- 
able. With  the  brutalization  of  his  body  his  mind 
grew  brutalized  as  well,  and  the  chronicles  of  the  time 
are  full  of  records  of  the  almost  savage  roughness  of 
his  manners.  The  accounts  of  his  orgies,  of  his  infa- 
mies, were  the  theme  of  Paris,  and  the  young  duke 
took  a  pleasure  in  spreading  the  worst  reports  concern- 
ing himself.  No  doubt  there  was  immense  exaggera- 
tion in  the  popular  reports  ;  no  doubt  there  was  im- 
mense exaggeration  in  the  stories  which  the  young 
duke  delighted  to  blow  abroad  about  himself,  blazoning 
defiantly  his  ambition  for  bestial  supremacy.  But  no 
matter  how  much  we  may  minimize,  or  seek  to  mini- 
mize, the  record,  we  are  left  perforce  with  but  a  sorry 
picture  of  the  young  De  Chartres.  Whether  the  sto- 
ries told  of  him,  most  of  them  unrepeatably  fantastic, 
are  true  or  not,  it  was  certainly  De  Chartres's  abomina- 
ble vanity  to  wish  them  to  be  believed. 


1747-87.  THE  GOOD  DUKE.  £67 

Such  was  the  man,  so  tarred  by  evil  reputation,  whom 
the  strange  customs  of  the  time  gave  in  marriage  to  the 
daughter  of  the  Duke  de  Penthievre.  If  there  was  any- 
thing to  be  said  for  the.  Old  Order,  for  the  old  nobility, 
the  Duke  de  Penthievre  embodied  most  of  the  argu- 
ments in  his  own  proper  person.  He  deserves  to  be 
remembered  in  the  history  of  his  time  as  the  good  Duke 
de  Penthievre.  He  was  the  richest  peer  in  France.  He 
had  one  daughter  and  one  son.  The  son,  the  young 
Prince  de  Larnballe,  was  married  to  that  princess  of 
the  House  of  Savoy  whom  we  have  met  before  and  shall 
meet  again,  the  beautiful,  unhappy  Princess  de  Lamballe. 
The  scandal  of  the  time  will  have  it  that  the  Duke  de 
Chartres  schemed  a  very  villainous  scheme.  He  resolved 
to  marry  the  daughter  of  the  Duke  de  Penthievre,  and 
to  get  rid  of  the  duke's  son,  so  that  the  vast  inheritance 
of  the  Penthievre  wealth  should  fall  into  the  Orleans 
exchequer.  To  carry  out  this  scheme  he  lured  the  young 
Prince  de  Lamballe  into  the  wildest  excesses  of  debauch- 
ery, and,  so  the  story  goes,  lest  the  weakened  constitu- 
tion and  the  tainted  blood  of  the  prince  should  resist 
the  persistent  licentiousness  to  which  he  was  urged,  De 
Chartres  assisted  the  process  by  the  actual  use  of  poison. 
How  far  these  horrible  accusations  are  true,  or  what 
shadow  of  truth  belongs  to  them,  it  is  impossible  to 
say,  almost  impossible  to  guess.  What  is  certain  is  that 
the  Prince  de  Lamballe  was  the  intimate  companion  of 
the  debaucheries  of  De  Chartres,  that  he  did  die,  very 
horribly  and  very  mysteriously,  and  that  the  Duke  de 
Chartres  did  marry  his  sister,  Mademoiselle  de  Pen- 
thievre, on  April  5,  1769.  It  is  a  hundred  and  twenty 
years  since  that  marriage  took  place,  but  we  can  still 
feel  the  profoundest  pity  for  the  unhappy  lady  whom 
fate  flung  into  the  arms  of  the  young  De  Chartres. 


268  THE  FRENCH  REVOLtTTlOtf.  CH.  XVIII. 

By  this  marriage  there  were  five  children — the  first, 
Louis  Philippe,  in  1773  ;  the  second,  the  Duke  de  Mont- 
pensier,  in  1775  ;  third,  the  Count  de  Beaujolais,  in 
1776  ;  and  fourth  and  fifth  in  1777,  Mademoiselle  Ade- 
laide and  a  twin  sister  who  died  young.  Concerning 
the  first-born  a  queer  story  circulates,  a  story  akin  to 
that  of  the  warming-pan  which  threw  such  discredit 
upon  the  birth  of  the  Old  Pretender,  James  Stuart. 
It  is  alleged,  and  gravely  believed  by  many,  that  Louis 
Philippe,  the  Duke  de  Chartres  of  1789,  the  Equality 
Junior  of  later  days,  the  Mr.  Smith  of  wanderings  over 
sea,  the  King  of  the  Barricades,  was  in  reality  no  son  of 
the  Duke  de  Chartres  and  of  the  daughter  of  the  Duke 
de  Penthievre,  but  the  child  of  an  Italian  jailer  named 
Chiappini,  who  lived  at  Modigliana,  in  the  Apennines. 
It  is  alleged  that  the  Duke  de  Penthievre  began  to  get 
anxious  about  the  succession  when  he  found  that  after 
four  years  of  marriage  there  was  no  male  issue,  and  that 
the  only  child  of  the  union  was  a  female  child  who  was 
stillborn.  The  Duke  de  Penthievre  was  still  a  com- 
paratively young  man  ;  he  was  not  yet  fifty  years  old  ; 
he  did  not  wish  his  vast  wealth  to  pass  to  collateral 
heirs,  as  it  would  have  passed  by  the  feudal  law  ;  he 
talked  of  marrying  again.  This  suggestion  was  not  at 
all  to  the  taste  of  the  Duke  de  Chartres,  hungry  for  the 
Penthievre  succession.  Finding  that  his  wife  was  again 

o  O 

with  child  in  the  beginning  of  1773,  he  carried  her  off 
to  Italy,  with  the  determination,  if  she  was  delivered  of 
a  female  child,  to  substitute  a  male  child.  At  Modig- 
liana, in  the  Apennines,  the  Duchess  de  Chartres  was 
delivered  of  a  female  child,  and  on  the  same  day  the 
wife  of  the  jailer  Chiappini  was  delivered  of  a  male 
child.  In  return  for  a  large  sum  of  money  the  Chiap- 
pinis  consented  to  exchange  the  children,  and  the  Duke 


1747-87.  THE   MODIGLIANA  LEGEND.  .269 

and  Duchess  de  Chartres  returned  to  Paris  with  a  son  and 
heir  who  had  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  House  of 
Orleans.  Such  is  the  extraordinary  story  which  is  told, 
a  story  which,  whether  we  believe  it  or  not,  has  undoubt- 
edly a  great  many  curious  circumstances  attendant  on  it. 
How  far  this  fantastic  story  has  any  element  of  truth 
in  it,  it  would  be  profitless  enough  to  inquire.  History 
teems  with  such  tales  of  audacious  substitutions  ;  the 
bearer  of  more  than  one  famous  name  has  sat  upon  a 
throne  by  virtue  of  that  name,  without,  according  to 
rumor,  the  slightest  right  to  name  or  throne.  It  is 
certain  that  the  story  was  told  ;  that  it  was  and  is  be- 
lieved by  some  ;  that  the  son  and  heir  of  the  Duke  de 
Chartres  was  declared  to  have  no  resemblance  to  either 
of  his  alleged  parents  ;  it  is  certain  that  when  Louis 
Philippe  in  the  fulness  of  time  came  to  be  king  for  a 
season,  he  was  harassed  by  a  lady  who  claimed  to  be 
the  first-born  child  of  Philip  Equality,  the  girl  who  was 
exchanged  for  the  child  of  the  Chiappinis.  The  Chiap- 
pini  story  is  the  story  of  the  enemy  of  the  Orleans  ;  the 
story  of  the  Orleans  themselves  is  simply  that  Louis 
Philippe  was  born  in  Paris  on  October  6,  1773.  There 
were  great  rejoicings  in  honor  of  the  occasion.  The 
beautiful  Sophie  Arnould,  fairest  of  stage-queens,  the 
wandering  star  of  so  many  loves  and  legends,  gave,  after 
permission  duly  sought  and  obtained  from  Fat  Philip,  a 
great  display  of  fireworks  in  the  gardens  of  the  Palais 
Royal  in  honor  of  the  event,  to  the  delight  of  an  enor- 
mous crowd.  It  really  matters  very  little  whether  Louis 
Philippe  was  or  was  not  the  son  of  Philip  Equality. 
But  it  is  worth  noting  that,  when  Voltaire  came  to  Paris 
in  1778  for  his  final  triumph,  he  took  the  boy  of  five  upon 
his  knee  and  declared  that  he  traced  in  his  childish  feat- 
ures a  striking  resemblance  to  the  Duke  de  Chartres. 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XVIII. 

Into  the  dim,  debauched,  disorganized  mind  of  the 
Duke  de  Chartres,  at  no  time  very  brilliant,  and  now  en- 
feebled by  excesses,  there  seems  to  have  glimmered  a  kind 
of  impression  that  he  was  in  some  way  destined  to  make  a 
figure  in  the  world.     How  this  was  to  be  accomplished 
was  less  evident,  but  in  his  uncertain  way  he  sought  after 
success  in  many  directions.     He  sought,  as  we  have  seen, 
to  be  infamous  among  the  infamous,  to  wear  the  libid- 
inous laurels  of  a  new  Trimalcio,  with  the  result  chiefly 
of  converting  a  sufficiently  comely  gentleman  into  pus- 
tuled  horror.     He  sought  for  success  in  the  service  of 
his  country  with  yet  more  disastrous  results.     He  was 
not  to  forget  for  long  enough  that  disastrous  sea-fight 
off  Brest,  in  which  English  Admiral  Keppel  was  so  very 
near  to  capturing  the  Saint -Esprit,  with  Vice-Admiral 
the  Duke  de  Chartres  on  board,  and  when  all  Paris  rang 
with  D'Orvilliers'  declaration  that  he  would  have  won 
the  day  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  stupidity  or  the  cow- 
ardice of  the  prince.     For  days  and  days  Paris  rang 
with  jeer,  epigram,  and  lampoon  against  the  luckless 
prince.     The   English  journals,  with  their  cruel   com- 
ments on  his  cowardice   and  ignorance  of  naval  war, 
were  largely  circulated,  largely  read.    De  Chartres  was 
the  ignominious  hero  of  the  hour.     Yet,  in  spite  of  all 
this,  in  spite  of  La  Motte-Piquet's  declaration,  "  If  I  had 
been  such  a  coward  as  your  royal  highness  I  should  have 
blown  my  brains  out,"  the  Duke  de  Chartres  was  still 
obstinate  enough  and  absurd  enough  to  press  Louis  XVL 
for  the  coveted  title  of  Grand- Admiral  of  France.    This 
was  too  much.     It  was  impossible  to  accord  the  highest 
naval  dignity  in  the  kingdom  to  the  hero  of  the  Brest 
catastrophe.     The  request  was  refused,  and,  though  the 
blow  was  softened  by  the  creation  of  a  post  of  colonel- 
general  of  hussars  and  of  light  troops,  to  which  he  was 


1747-87.  LOUIS  PHILIPPE'S  ANGLOMANIA.  271 

appointed,  Philip  was  not  to  be  placated.  It  is  from 
this  point  that  his  hostility  to  the  king  and  queen  may 
be  considered  to  date  its  most  acrid  virulence.  Be- 
tween Marie  Antoinette  and  the  Duke  de  Chartres  there 
had  long  been  war.  It  would  seehi  that  among  the 
many  vague  ideas  or  semblances  of  ideas  that  floated 
through  the  bemused  intelligence  of  the  Duke  de  Char- 
tres, one  idea  which  appeared  at  one  time  especially  in- 
viting to  him  was  to  become  the  lover  of  the  dauphin- 
ess.  Whether  some  dim  notion  of  acquiring  power  and 
influence  spurred  him.  in  this  direction,  or  merely  the 
habitual  promptings  of  a  profligate  nature,  to  which  any 
woman  seemed  an  invitation,  it  would  be  hard  to  de- 
cide. "Whatever  advances  De  Chartres  made  did  not 
receive  favorable  reception  from  Marie  Antoinette,  and 
she  found  a  most  unforgiving  foe. 

The  popularity  which  Philip  had  failed  to  acquire  by 
heroism  at  sea  he  succeeded,  however,  in  acquiring  by 
other  means.  Whether  he  was,  as  some  historians  would 
have  us  believe,  a  desperately  ambitious  man,  or,  as 
others  insist,  merely  a  more  or  less  helpless  tool  in  the 
hand  of  schemers  who  wanted  a  figure-head  and  found 
in  him  the  man  for  the  purpose,  it  is  clear  that  he 
courted  notoriety  and  popularity,  and  that  he  became 
both  notorious  and  popular.  His  Anglomania  helped 
him  to  obtain  the  one,  helped  him  indeed  to  obtain  the 
other.  From  his  various  visits  to  England,  where  he 
had  shone  a  lustrous  foreign  star  in  the  most  dissolute 
set  of  the  day,  he  had  brought  back  a  taste  for  the 
English  mode  of  dress,  for  English  vehicles,  English 
horses,  English  jockeys,  English  races.  He  set  smart 
Paris  wild  with  Anglomania.  It  was  vastly  comic  to 
see  the  gay  young  nobility  of  the  court  aping  the  man- 
ners and  the  customs  of  the  race  with  whom  they  were 


272  THE  TRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XVIII. 

so  incessantly  at  war.  But  no  number  of  English  horses 
to  run,  English  clothes  to  wear,  English  jockeys  to  back, 
or  English  oaths  to  swear,  would  have  made  De  Chartres 
popular  with  the  Parisian  masses,  however  much  notoriety 
they  might  lend  to  his  marred  personality.  For  his  popu- 
larity he  relied  largely  upon  the  influence  he  gained  from 
his  association  with  an  institution  which,  though  now  firm- 
ly established  on  French  soil,  owed  its  origin  to  England. 
Freemasonry  had  grown  and  flourished  since  it  had  been 
implanted  in  the  days  of  the  Regency,  and  among  the 
Freemasons  the  Duke  de  Chartres  was  an  important 
personage.  In  1771  he  had  been  named  grand-master 
of  all  the  lodges  in  France.  Freemasonry  had  not  then 
penetrated  at  all  into  the  mass  of  the  people  ;  it  was 
confined  practically  to  the  upper  classes  ;  it  seems  cer- 
tain that  the  influence  of  the  French  lodges  was  solidly 
given  to  the  Duke  de  Chartres  and  the  principles  which 
he  represented  or  was  supposed  to  represent.  Such  as 
he  was,  notorious  by  his  manners,  powerful  by  his  in- 
fluence with  the  Freemasons,  popular  by  reason  of  his 
large  fortune  and  his  ready  hand,  the  unlovely  Philip  of 
Orleans  was  one  of  the  most  dangerous  of  the  many 
dangerous  enemies  that  were  to  confront  Louis  XVI.  on 
the  day  when  the  States-General  were  opened. 

Perry  contributes  his  sketch  to  the  historic  portraits 
of  Equality  Orleans.  "  The  Duke  of  Orleans,  as  he  was 
then  called,  communicated,  by  means  of  his  wealth,  a 
powerful  impulsion  to  the  growing  spirit  of  the  times. 
He  gave  dinners,  he  gave  suppers  to  the  new  reformers  ; 
he  collected  at  his  table  all  that  was  learned,  all  that 
was  experienced  in  the  polity  of  nations,  and  this  he  did, 
perhaps  not  wholly  from  a  love  of  the  principle  that 
had  put  all  this  in  motion,  but  partly  from  a  hatred  he 
had  to  the  -court ;  a  hatred  rendered  the  more  inveter- 


1747-87.  PERRY'S  PORTRAIT.  273 

ate  from  a  reprimand  he  had  received  from  the  king  for 
certain  irregularities,  committed  too  near  the  eyes  of 
the  palace.  Besides  these  parties  formed  in  the  private 
rooms  of  the  prince,  he  instituted  a '  club  of  S9avans,'  into 
which  the  learned  of  any  nation  might  be  introduced 
by  two  members.  This  club  every  day  increased  in 
numbers ;  such  discussions  took  place  in  it  as  occasioned 
the  king  to  send  an  express  order  for  its  discontinuance, 
under  pain  of  royal  displeasure.  The  duke  found  it 
was  too  soon  to  resist,  he  therefore  withdrew,  and  the 
members  wholly  dispersed.  This  may  be  considered  a 
great  stretch  of  arbitrary  power,  at  such  a  period  especi- 
ally, as  the  club  was  held  in  a  private  room,  at  a  house 
under  the  colonnade  of  the  Palais  Royal,  upon  his  own 
estate,  and  where,  by  the  rules  drawn  up  by  the  members, 
no  gaming  was  allowed.  The  company  in  the  coffee- 
houses talked  politics  louder  than  ever  had  been  known 
before  ;  these  disputants  were  not  to  be  checked,  al- 
though mouchards,  as  they  were  called,  were  planted  in 
all  the  most  considerable  places  of  public  resort,  to  lis- 
ten and  report  to  their  employers  what  they  had  heard 
and  seen."  Perry's  portrait  adds  one  more  testimony  to 
the  extreme  importance  of  the  part  that  Equality  Or- 
leans chose  to  play  or  was  made  to  play.  Beneath  the 
corruption  of  an  Alcibiades  he  had,  as  we  are  yet  to 
learn,  something  of  the  courage  of  an  Alcibiades  ;  had 
he  also  something  of  the  ability  of  an  Alcibiades  as 
well  ?  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  a  man  who  filled  so 
large  a  place  in  so  grave  a  time  could  have  been  merely 
a  puppet  in  the  hands  of  others,  an  able  Duport,  an  able 
Laclos.  The  Regent  Orleans  was  a  scoundrel,  but  he 
wras  also  a  man  of  ability.  His  grandson  may  be  ad- 
mitted to  have  resembled  him  in  both  particulars,  only 
with  more  of  the  scoundrelism  and  less  of  the  ability. 
I.— 18 


274  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 


CHAPTER   XIX. 

BKIENNE    IS    BLOWN    OUT. 

ON  November  21  the  king  sent  for  his  Parliament 
and  rated  them  roundly  for  daring  to  make  any  protest 
against  his  good  pleasure.  But  while  he  menaced  he 
reminded  them  of  his  promise  concerning  States-General. 
"I  have  said  that  I  will  convoke  them  before  1792 — 
that  is,  in  1791  at  the  latest;  my  word  is  sacred."  Pool- 
king,  it  was  not  he  who  was  convoking  the  States-Gen- 
eral, but  a  stronger  power  than  he,  which,  after  finding 
voice  through  the  mouths  of  its  Lafayettes  and  Saba- 
thiers,  was  beginning  to  find  voices  in  every  mouth  that 
could  articulate  in  France.  To  the  royal  menace  and 
the  royal  pledge  the  president  of  the  Parliament  very 
respectfully  answered  by  informing  the  king  of  the  sur- 
prise with  which  the  Parliament  had  heard  of  the  dis- 
grace of  a  prince  of  the  royal  blood,  and  the  imprison- 
ment of  two  magistrates,  "  for  having  uttered  freely  in 
the  royal  presence  what  their  duty  and  their  conscience 
dictated."  The  king  answered  curtly  that  his  Parlia- 
ment ought  to  assume  that  he  had  strong  reasons  for 
banishing  a  prince  of  his  blood  ;  as  for  the  two  magis- 
trates, he  had  punished  them  because  he  was  displeased 
with  them. 

From  that  moment  out  the  quarrel  between  the  king 
and  his  Parliament  grew  keener  and  more  acrid.  Through 
the  long  winter,  through  the  long  spring,  the  Parliament 
kept  firing  off  its  protests  against  the  royal  proceedings j 


1787.  THE  SWIMMER  AND  THE  SEX.  275 

the  contagion  began  to  spread,  and  the  provincial  Par- 
liaments to  grow  mutinous  like  the  Paris  Parliament, 
Everywhere  was  confusion  rapidly  growing  worse  con- 
founded, the  discontent  increasing,  the  deficit  also  in- 
creasing, and  Lomenie  de  Brienne  on  the  top  of  all  as  a 
man  is  on  the  top  of  a  wave,  and  as  little  liable  to  con-, 
trol  or  guide  it  as  a  single  swimmer  could  control  or 
guide  the  sea.  In  the  face  of  all  the  popular  clamor, 
the  court  made  a  pitiable  little  effort  to  show  an  eco- 
nomical spirit.  Marie  Antoinette  diminished  the  num- 
ber of  her  horses,  carriages,  and  servants.  Certain  offices 
were  suppressed,  and  their  emoluments,  in  consequence, 
saved,  very  much  to  the  indignation  of  the  stately  gen- 
tlemen who  held  those  offices.  The  Duke  de  Polignac, 
who  was  Master  of  the  Bear  Hounds,  made  luckless 
Lomenie  almost  apologize  to  him  in  the  queen's  pres- 
ence for  purposing  to  suppress  his  office,  and  then,  turn- 
ing to  the  queen,  made  her  a  present  of  his  post  "  out 
of  the  generosity  of  his  heart."  The  Duke  de  Coigny, 
whom  popular  report  declared  to  be  one  of  the  many 
lovers  of  the  queen,  quarrelled  so  angrily  with  the  king 
about  the  suppression  of  his  post  that,  in  Louis's  own 
words,  they  nearly  came  to  blows. 

But  it  was  not  the  suppression  of  petty  pelting  little 
offices  of  this  kind  that  was  to  fill  the  empty  exchequer 
or  to  appease  popular  discontent.  Lomenie,  gravely 
sick  in  body,  more  sick  than  ever  in  mind,  was  becom- 
ing more  and  more  desperately  convinced  that  his  part 
of  strong  man  was  to  be  decisively  played  now.  He 
had  an  idea  in  his  head,  one  of  the  insanest  of  his  many 
insane  schemes,  which  he  was  now  about  to  carry  into 
execution.  This  was  no  other  than  the  entire  suppres- 
sion of  all  the  parliaments  in  France,  and  the  establish- 
ment of  a  brand-new  "  Cour  Pleniere."  It  was  to  con-' 


2^6  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XIX. 

sist  of  certain  great  nobles,  officials,  and  lawyers  named 
for  life.  It  was  to  have  the  registering  powers  of  the 
Parliaments.  Small  law-courts  were  to  be  appointed  to 
administer  justice  in  the  bailiwicks  of  France.  The 
States-General  were  to  be  summoned  for  January,  1791. 
Several  reforms,  based,  like  those  of  Calonne,  on  Tur- 
got's  suggestions,  were  to  be  brought  forward. 

All  this  was  to  be  prepared  with  the  strictest  secrecy, 
and  suddenly  sprung  upon  an  astonished  people  and  a 
defeated  Parliament.  But,  unhappily  for  Lomenie  de 
Brienne,  against  whom  the  very  stars  in  their  courses 
seemed  to  fight,  it  could  not  be  kept  secret.  It  was 
plain  that  something  was  in  the  air  ;  mysterious  move- 
ments of  troops,  mysterious  orders  to  all  the  provincial 
intendants  to  be  at  their  posts  on  a  certain  day,  myste- 
rious incessant  printing  at  the  guarded  royal  chateau. 
The  apparently  triumphant  Parliament  took  alarm. 
Most  especially  one  of  the  triumphant  Parliamentarians 
took  alarm,  the  wildly  eloquent  Duval  d'JSpremesnil. 
D'lSpremesnil  was  a  son  of  that  D'lSpremesnil  who  had 
served  the  brilliant,  unfortunate  Dupleix  out  in  India — 
Dupleix,  whose  star  set  before  the  genius  of  Clive — 
and  had  married  Dupleix's  daughter.  Parliamentarian 
d'lSpremesnil  had  been  born  in  Pondicherry,  in  1746, 
and  he  was  now  in  his  forty-first  year,  a  distinguished, 
very  eloquent,  very  hot-headed  advocate.  It  became 
his  fixed  determination  to  find  out  what  was  being  print- 
ed, and,  by  patience  and  the  bribery  of  a  printer's  wife, 
he  did  find  out  what  was  going  on.  A  proof  of  the  royal 
edict  concerning  the  new  Plenary  Court  was  smug- 
gled out  and  into  D'Epremesnil's  hands.  On  May  3 
D'Epremesnil  communicated  his  discovery  to  the  Par- 
liament, which  immediately  passed  a  series  of  highly 
dignified  resolutions  which,  reduced  to  their  simplest 


1788.  D'ARTAGNAN  D'AGOUST. 

terms,  implied  that  the  Parliament  meant  to  stick  to 
its  guns. 

Bat,  if  the  Parliament  meant  sticking  to  its  guns,  so, 
also,  did  Lomenie  de  Brienne,  clinging  fanatically  to  his 
ill-omened  part  of  strong  man.  He  launched  two  let- 
tres  de  cachet,  one  against  D'Epremesnil,  one  against  a 
brother  Parliamentarian,  Goislard  de  Montsabert,  who 
had  made  himself  obnoxious  by  his  opposition  to  the 
ministerial  devices.  But  luck  was  heavily  against  Lo- 
menie. Somehow  or  other,  D'Epremesnil  and  Goislard 
heard  of  the  threatened  arrests,  escaped  somehow  in 
disguise  from  the  hand  of  the  law,  and  made  their  ap- 
pearance before  an  indignant  Parliament  on  May  5, 1 788, 
and  told  their  tale.  The  indignant  Parliament  solemnly 
placed  the  two  threatened  men  and  all  other  magistrates 
and  citizens  under  the  protection  of  the  king  and  of  the 
law — an  imposing,  but  scarcely  very  serviceable,  formula 
—then  it  sent  off  a  deputation  to  Versailles  to  the  king, 
and  remained  in  permanent  session  to  see  what  would 
happen.  Captain  D'Agoust  happened — Captain  Vin- 
cent d'Agoust,  at  the  head  of  the  French  Guards,  with 
fixed  bayonets,  and  a  company  of  sappers.  Captain  Vin- 
cent d'Agoust  was  a  steadfast,  soldierly  man,  who  may 
remind  us  a  little  of  Dumas  the  Elder's  D'Artagnan. 
Whatever  he  had  to  do  he  would  do  thoi'oughly,  with- 
out the  slightest  regard  for  anything  in  the  world  but 
his  own  consigne.  He  was  famous,  testifies  Weber, 
for  an  exceeding  firmness ;  a  gentleman  of  the  most 
ancient  stock,  steeped  in  the  spirit  of  his  ancestors — 
much  more  inclined  to  push  the  principles  of  honor  to 
an  extreme  than  to  forget  them  for  a  single  second. 
Once  his  pertinacity  and  firmness  had  driven  the  grand- 
son of  the  Grand  Conde,  whom  he  considered  to  have 
given  Lira,  cause  of  offence,  although  a  prince  of  the 


278  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

blood,  into  fighting  a  duel  with  him.  It  was  not  in  the 
nature  of  such  a  man,  murmurs  poor  Weber,  plaintively, 
to  make  himself,  as  was  said  in  those  days  of  exaggera- 
tion, the  vile  instrument  of  ministerial  despotism;  but, 
as  a  servant  of  the  king,  he  believed  it  to  be  his  duty 
to  obey  whatever  the  king  ordered.  He  certainly  now 
carried  out  his  orders  in  very  thorough  fashion.  He 
surrounded  the  Palace  of  Justice  with  his  troops,  al- 
lowed no  one  out,  and  solemnly  entered,  after  some  for- 
mal delays,  into  the  presence  of  the  infuriated  and  pos- 
sibly slightly  alarmed  Parliament.  D'Agoust  demanded 
the  persons  of  D'Epremesnil  and  Goislard,  produced  a 
royal  order,  addressed  to  himself  and  signed  by  the  king, 
authorizing  him  to  arrest  them  wherever  they  might  be. 
Here,  however,  a  difficulty  arose.  Captain  d'Agoust 
did  not  know  Goislard  or  D'Epremesnil  by  sight; 
he  invited  the  Parliament  to  surrender  them  ;  to  point 
them  out.  The  Parliament,  as  a  body,  emphatically  de- 
clined. "  We  are  all  Goislards  and  D'Epremesnils  here," 
one  enthusiast  cried  out.  "If  you  want  to  arrest  them, 
arrest  us  all."  From  the  midnight,  when  D'Agoust  first 
came,  till  nigh  midday,  the  Parliament  remained  sitting, 
while  D'Agoust  sent  for  further  orders.  There  was 
.something  sublime,  but  there  was  also  something  ridic- 
ulous, in  this  eccentric  all-night  sitting,  with  the  men  of 
the  sword  watching  the  men  of  the  robe,  to  the  grave 
physical  discomfort  of  some  of  them  through  the  small 
hours,  and  nobody  knowing  what  was  to  happen  next. 
At  eleven  in  the  morning  D'Agoust  came  back  again, 
bringing  with  him  one  Larchier,  "  exempt  de  robe-courte," 
whom  he  called  upon  to  point  out  to  him  the  two  men  he 
was  looking  for.  The  pale,  perturbed  exempt  looked 
tremblingly  over  the  lines  of  Parliamentarians,  sitting 
Roman-senator-like  in  their  places,  and  declared  that  he 


1788.  WEBER'S  SOLDIER.  279 

could  not  see  them.  Perhaps  he  closed  his  eyes.  Baf- 
fled D'Agoust  again  appealed  to  the  Assembly,  and  on 
receiving  no  answer  again  withdrew.  Then  D'Epre- 
mesnil  and  Goislard  resolved  to  surrender  themselves, 
in  order  to  save  Larchier  from  the  grave  peril  to  which 
his  refusal  to  point  them  out  might  expose  him. 
D'Agoust  was  summoned  to  return;  D'Epremesnil  and 
Goislard  surrendered  themselves  with  much  eloquence 
and  solemnity,  and  were  escorted  out  through  lines  of 
bayonets  to  the  carriages  that  were  in  waiting  for  them. 
D'Epremesnil  was  sent  to  the  Isle  of  Sainte-Marguerite, 
Goislard  to  Pierre-en-Cise.  Then  the  whole  Parliament 
had  to  march  out  in  its  turn  through  the  lines  of  bayo- 
nets, while  the  gallant  D'Agoust  locked  the  doors  of  the 
Palace  of  Justice  and  carried  off  the  keys.  So  ended 
the  first  mad  stroke  of  waning  despotism  against  an 
awakening  nation.  Lomenie,  the  strong  man,  had  done 
the  most  foolish  thing  it  was  in  his  power  to  do,  and  so, 
in  one  sense  at  least,  had  attained  excellence.  Why 
was  there  no  one  to  remind  Louis  of  that  other  king, 
that  English  monarch,  who  had  also  played  at  the  game 
of  arresting  representatives  of  popular  feeling,  and  who 
had  paid  a  heavy  price  for  his  play  ?  Louis  XVI.  was 
imitating  Charles  I.  of  England,  and  with  a  like  re- 
sult. 

It  is  curious  to  read  in  Weber's  book  that  he,  being 
attracted  to  the  neighborhood  of  the  Palace  of  Justice 
while  all  these  events  were  going  on,  overheard  a  man 
in  the  crowd  ask  one  of  the  Gardes  Fran§aises  if  he 
would  fire  upon  the  people  in  the  case  of  any  attempt 
being  made  to  rescue  the  menaced  Parliamentarians. 
"  Ay,"  responded  the  soldier,  "  I  would  fire  upon  my 
friend,  I  would  fire  upon  my  brother,  if  I  received  the 
order  to  do  so."  A  soldierly  response  of  a  kind  dear  to 


280  THE  FREKCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

such  as  Weber.  But  Weber  had  only  to  wait  another 
poor  year  or  so  to  find  that  sort  of  soldierly  mood  strange- 
ly changed. 

The  country  would  have  none  of  the  new  courts.  A 
spirit  of  fierce  opposition  spread  like  flame  all  over  the 
country.  Paris  blazed  like  a  volcano,  vomiting  sedi- 
tious placards  and  proclamations  of  all  kinds,  more  than 
desperate  authority  could  suppress;  more,  almost,  than 
fiery-eyed  sedition  could  read,  or  certainly  digest,  the 
whole  meaning  of.  But  the  pith  of  it  all  was  that  Paris 
would  not  be  off  with  the  old  love,  and  would  not  be  on 
with  the  new.  Impassioned,  if  discreetly  anonymous,  pa- 
triotism called  upon  indignant  citizens,  in  highly  inflam- 
matory language,  to  resist  to  the  uttermost.  The  old, 
old  cry,  that  had  been  the  burden  of  so  many  tumults, 
was  repeated  again  and  again,  in  the  written  and  the 
spoken  word,  "To  your  tents,  O  Israel!"  Nor  did  the 
opposition  come  alone  from  inflamed  civism,  from  an 
irate  bourgeoisie,  from  an  insurrectionary  populace. 
Peers  and  princes  were  as  eloquently  hostile  as  the 
most  belligerent  burgess  of  them  all.  Did  not  the 
three  great  Dukes  of  la  Rochefoucauld,  de  Noailles, 
and  Luxembourg  positively  and  peremptorily  refuse  to 
sit  in  the  new  court  ?  Did  not  peers  and  princes  of  the 
Church  approach  the  ear  of  majesty  and  urge  him  with 
eloquent  if  dutiful  solicitations  to  reflect  ? — a  thing  not 
much  in  poor  Louis's  line. 

Paris  was  in  a  highly  irritable  mood.  Bread  was 
very  dear;  it  had  risen  from  two  and  a  half  to  four  sous 
a  pound.  In  fear  of  worse  to  come,  prudent  families 
began  to  dismiss  all  superfluous  servants;  and  these, 
seeking  situations  and  finding  them  not,  added  them- 
selves to  the  floating  discontent.  Want  of  bread  and 
want  of  employment  are  two  potent  factors  of  disaffec- 


1788.  PROVINCIAL  PROTESTS.  281 

tion,  and  neither  of  them  was  wanting  in  Paris  in  the 
winter  of  1789. 

Poor  Lomenie  was  now  in  something  of  the  position 
of  Faust  when  he  has  summoned  the  Earth  Spirit  and  is 
afraid  of  it,  or  of  the  Arabian  fisherman  when  he  set 
free  the  Djinn.  He  had  aroused  a  storm  which  he  was 
wholly  unable  to  lay.  It  was  all  very  well  for  the  king, 
in  the  solemn  formality  of  a  Bed  of  Justice,  to  register 
his  edicts.  He  could  not  get  them  obeyed.  Public  opin- 
ion was  all  against  him;  the  Chatelet  protested  by  pass- 
ing a  vigorous  resolution  against  the  edicts;  all  over  the 
provinces  the  flame  of  fierce  protest  spread  and  spread. 
The  Parliament  of  Rennes  declared  that  any  one  who 
entered  the  new  Plenary  Court  was  infamous.  After 
sitting  from  four  o'clock  in  the  morning  until  six  o'clock 
in  the  evening,  it  passed,  among  other  violent  resolu- 
tions, one  in  which  it  declared  all  persons  who  should 
in  any  degree  attempt  to  carry  the  sovereign's  new  or- 
dinances into  execution  to  be  guilty  of  high-treason, 
and  to  be  prosecuted  and  punished  as  such.  The  arri- 
val of  a  strong  detachment  of  the  troops  in  garrison  in- 
terrupted their  proceedings;  but  the  inhabitants  came 
in  crowds  to  the  rescue  of  the  Parliament,  reinforced  by 
a  vast  concourse  of  people  from  the  adjacent  country. 
There  was  a  scuffle  which  grew  into  a  riot.  The  troops 
found  themselves  compelled  to  give  way  to  the  immense 
multitude  of  their  antagonists,  and  relinquish  their  de- 
signs upon  the  Parliament.  No  person  could  be  found 
venturesome  enough  to  serve  the  lettres  de  cachet  which 
had  been  sent  down  for  the  exile  or  imprisonment  of 
the  members.  The  excitement  became  so  violent  and 
the  rioting  so  alarming  that  the  Bishop  of  Rennes  judged 
it  wise  to  set  out  himself  express  to  Paris,  and  to  use 
such  expedition  as  to  spend  but  thirty-six  hours  on  a 


282  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

journey  of  two  hundred  miles,  in  order  to  lay  before 
the  king  a  clear  statement  of  the  desperate  condition  of 
things  in  that  province. 

But  of  all  the  opposition  to  the  schemes  of  Brienne 
the  most  serious  came  from  Dauphine.  Grenoble  had 
battled  briskly,  even  bloodily,  against  the  exile  of  its 
Parliament ;  had  set  up  its  Parliament  by  force  of  arms. 
When  the  tumult  subsided,  the  Parliament  obeyed  the 
lettres  de  cachet  that  had  been  levelled  at  it,  and  Greno- 
ble found  itself  without  a  government.  But  Grenoble 
boasted  a  citizen  of  import,  a  man  of  some  thirty  years 
of  age,  whom  failing  health  had  driven  from  the  bar ; 
a  man  who  had  studied  much  his  Montesquieu  and  his 
Blackstone,  who  was  a  perfervid  admirer  of  the  English 
Constitution.  His  name  was  Mounier ;  we  shall  meet 
with  him  again.  Prompted  by  Mounier,  the  city  held 
a  solemn  conclave,  and  decided  upon  a  convocation  of 
the  three  orders  of  the  province,  with  double  represen- 
tation of  the  Third  Estate.  The  enthusiasm  knew  no 
bounds.  Brienne  in  vain  endeavored  to  stop  the  cur- 
rent of  public  feeling.  Orders  of  Council  prohibiting 
the  Assemblies  were  only  put  up  to  be  promptly  torn 
down  again  by  an  enthusiastic  populace.  Marshal  de 
Vaux,  sent  down  to  prohibit  by  force  of  arms,  found 
it  better  to  temporize.  He  found  the  whole  province 
against  him,  the  Three  Orders  unanimous.  His  troops, 
too,  showed  themselves  'to  be  in  sympathy  with  the 
popular  will.  The  marshal  was  assured  by  his  subor- 
dinate officers  that  the  soldiers,  and  the  officers  too, 
were  not  to  be  counted  upon.  What  was  he  to  do  ? 
He  did  the  best  he  could.  If  the  Assembly  were  held 
at  Grenoble  he  would  put  it  down,  he  said  ;  but  if  it 
were  held  somewhere  else,  why,  he  would  take  no  hos- 
tile notice  of  it.  It  accordingly  was  held  at  Vizille,  in 


1788.  DARING  DAUPHINE.  283 

the  tennis-court — tennis-courts  are  important  in  these 
times — of  the  chateau  of  a  rich  manufacturer  whose 
name  deserves  to  be  recorded,  M.  Claude  Perier.  The 
Assembly  elected  Mounier  its  secretary,  gravely  de- 
manded the  summons  of  the  States-General,  and  then 
gravely  adjourned,  having  performed  the  most  momen- 
tous deed  yet  done  by  them.  Brienne  was  for  meeting 
this  rebellion  by  armed  force  ;  the  king  was  too  pru- 
dent ;  the  demand  of  Vizille  was  to  be  obeyed  at  Ver- 
sailles. It  would  be  impossible  to  overrate  the  import- 
ance of  that  early  movement  in  Dauphine  or  of  the  debt 
that  a  dawning  democracy  owed  to  Grenoble  and  Vizille. 

In  Flanders,  in  Brittany,  in  Languedoc,  in  Beam,  and 
in  Provence,  disturbances  of  the  like  sinister  kind  broke 
out.  Brienne  had  certainly  roused  the  country  ;  he 
still  made  desperate  efforts  to  tranquillize  it  by  the  old 
devices.  He  met  Parliamentary  opposition  with  decrees 
of  exile,  but  decrees  of  exile  would  not  fill  his  treasury. 

The  very  elements  fought  against  Lomenie,  much  as 
the  stars  in  their  courses  fought  against  Sisera.  We 
learn  that  on  July  13,  1788,  about  nine  in  the  morning, 
without  any  eclipse,  a  dreadful  and  almost  total  dark- 
ness suddenly  overspread  the  face  of  the  earth  in  sev- 
eral parts  of  France,  and  this  awful  gloom  was  the  pre- 
-lude  to  a  tempest  or  hurricane  supposed  to  be  without 
example  in  the  temperate  climates  of  Europe.  The 
whole  face  of  nature  was  so  totally  changed  in  about 
an  hour  that  no  person  who  had  slept  during  the  tem- 
pest could  have  believed  himself  in  the  same  part  of  the 
world  when  he  awoke.  The  soil  was  changed  into  a 
morass,  the  standing  corn  beaten  into  the  quagmire,  the 
vines  broken  to  pieces,  and  their  branches  buried  in  the 
same  manner,  the  fruit-trees  of  eveiy  kind  demolished, 
and  the  hail  lying  unmelted  in  heaps,  like  rocks  of  solid 


284  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

ice.  The  disordered  state  of  public  affairs  prevented 
both  the  course  and  extent  of  this  hurricane  from  being 
defined  as  it  would  have  been  in  a  happier  season.  The 
thoughts  of  those  who  were  qualified  to  observe  and 
record  so  extraordinary  a  phenomenon  were  otherwise 
occupied ;  and  the  sufferers  could  only  describe  what 
they  immediately  felt,  with  little  curiosity  as  to  the  fate 
of  others.  Several  large  districts  were  entirely  deso- 
lated ;  one  of  sixty  square  leagues  was  totally  ruined. 
Of  the  sixty-six  parishes  included  in  the  district  of  Pon- 
toise,  forty-three  were  entirely  desolated,  while  of  the 
remaining  twenty-three  some  lost  two  thirds,  and  others 
not  less  than  half  their  harvest.  The  entire  loss  or 
damage  was  said  to  be  moderately  estimated  at  four- 
score millions  of  livres,  or  between  three  and  four  mill- 
ion pounds  sterling.  • 

Brienne,  at  his  wit's  end  now,  called  an  extraordi- 
nary Assembly  of  the  Clergy,  which  immediately  passed 
an  address  to  the  king  calling  for  abolition  of  the  Ple- 
nary Courts  and  the  summoning  of  the  States-General. 
Lomenie  had  to  go.  He  went  in  August,  1788,  leaving 
ruin  behind  him.  It  is  impossible  not  to  pity  the  poor 
creature,  called  in  at  so  desperate  a  pinch  to  do  what 
no  one  could  do,  and  quitting  the  scene  amidst  univer- 
sal execration,  because  he  could  not  achieve  the  impos- 
sible. He  had  filled  his  own  pockets,  however,  which 
may  have  served  to  slightly  console  him,  and  he  van- 
ished into  outer  darkness  after  urging  the  king  to  send 
for  Necker. 

Sardonic  Grimm  declared  that  there  never  was  a  min- 
ister who  showed  such  talents  for  throwing  everything 
into  confusion  as  Lomenie  de  Brienne.  He  had  shaken 
to  pieces  the  whole  political  machine  in  the  space  of  a 
few  months.  Thanks  to  the  happy  ascendency  of  his 


1788.  GRIMM  THE  OBSERVER.  285 

genius,  it  could  truly  be  said  that  there  was  not  a  single 
public  body  in  France  that  remained  in  its  place,  or  re- 
tained its  natural  movements.  Grimm's  amused  eyes 
noted  a  Parliament  suddenly  adopting  a  system  directly 
opposed  to  its  own  interests,  a  system  it  had  anathema- 
tized a  hundred  times ;  noted  a  nobility,  the  existence 
of  which  seemed  the  most  intimately  connected  with 
the  rights  of  the  throne,  wearing  an  air  of  being  dis- 
posed to  separate  itself.  Even  the  military  spirit  seemed 
to  that  ironic  gaze  overpowered  by  some  spirit,  lauda- 
ble in  itself,  perhaps,  but  rather  difficult  to  reconcile 
with  that  character  of  subordination  without  which 
there  could  be  neither  discipline  nor  army.  The  clergy 
no  longer  preached  obedience,  and  the  soldiers  seemed 
no  longer  disposed  to  maintain  it.  What  seemed  still 
more  remarkable  to  the  astute  Grimm  was  that  this 
universal  discontent  had  been  preceded  by  declarations 
from  the  king  the  most  favorable  to  public  liberty. 
The  king  had  just  been  making  more  sacrifices  of  his 
authority  than  any  of  his  predecessors  had  ever  ven- 
tured to  do.  The  Parliaments  had  called  aloud  for  the 
assistance  of  that  which  of  all  other  things  they  had 
most  to  fear,  a  meeting  of  the  States-General,  "carried 
away  by  a  man  totally  without  consideration  among 
them,  an  Abbe  de  Sabathier."  All,  he  declares,  holding 
up  his  hands  in  amazement,  as  if  actuated  by  some  su- 
pernatural influence,  have  demanded  the  convocation 
of  the  States-General,  making,  as  it  were,  in  this  man- 
ner amends  to  the  nation  for  having  so  long  usurped 
the  most  capital  of  its  rights. 

Back  came  Necker  again,  as  serenely  confident  as 
ever  that  if  a  crisis  existed  he  was  the  man  for  the 
crisis.  That  unconquerably  conceited  heart  imagined 
itself  equal  to  all  emergencies,  Family  affection  is  a 


286  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

very  beautiful  thing,  and  a  very  wholesome  thing,  but 
it  is  possible  that  the  family  affection  which  surrounded 
Necker  was  not  overgood  for  him.  To  have  a  clever 
wife  and  a  clever  daughter  daily  and  hourly  assuring 
an  ambitious  man  that  he  is  a  new  savior  of  society,  a 
sort  of  little  god  upon  earth,  often  has  the  disastrous 
effect  of  making  the  ambitious  man  believe  it.  And 
Necker  was  inclined  to  believe  almost  anything  in  the 
way  of  praise  that  could  be  offered  to  him.  The  fire 
of  his  ambition,  assiduously  fanned  within  the  circle  of 
his  family,  was  for  the  moment  assiduously  fed  outside. 
The  public  had  got  into  their  heads  a  queer  kind  of 
belief  in  the  omnipotence  of  Necker.  He  was  known 
to  be  an  honest  man,  and  honest  men  had  been  so  rare 
in  the  administration  of  the  finances  that  it  was  scarcely 
surprising  if  other  qualities  were  attributed  to  him  even 
more  miraculous.  It  seemed,  a  satirical  observer  said, 
as  if  they  conceived  that  he  possessed  a  magical  wand ; 
that  by  waving  it  he  could  pay  off  an  immense  public 
debt  without  money  ;  and  that  by  another  movement 
he  could  with  the  same  ease  supply  twenty-five  mill- 
ions of  people  with  corn  and  bread.  Circumstances 
seemed  for  a  moment  to  give  a  sanction  to  the  delu- 
sion ;  the  funds  suddenly  rose,  and  the  general  good- 
humor  seemed  to  dispel  the  black  clouds  which  hung 
so  heavily  over  the  political  horizon. 

Necker  on  the  spur  of  the  moment  could  think  of 
nothing  better  to  do  than  to  summon  the  Notables  again, 
and  see  how  they  might  help  him  out  of  the  muddle 
into  which  Lomenie  had  plunged  things.  Since  the 
States-General  were  to  be  summoned,  the  best  thing 
now  was  to  settle  how  they  were  to  be  composed,  what 
form  of  convocation  should  be  used,  in  what  order  the 
elections  should  take  place,  and  the  manner  ip  which 


1788.  NECKER  .REDUX.  287 

the  different  assemblies  which  were  to  give  instructions 
to  their  deputies  to  the  States  should  be  held.  These 
knotty  points  were  lengthily  discussed.  The  year  drove 
on  ;  russet  autumn  deepened  into  bitter  winter  ;  France 
fermented  and  poured  forth  its  cahiers /  theatrical  no- 
bles solemnly  renounced  in  the  nick  of  time  their  pecu- 
niary privileges  and  were  laughed  at,  not  admired  ; 
Bertrand  de  Molleville  wept  tears  of  blood  over  the 
ingratitude  of  men.  To  his  amiable  mind  it  seemed 
that  the  Third  Estate  ought  to  have  been  satisfied  with 
the  important  sacrifices  made  by  the  princes  of  the  blood 
and  the  nobility;  but  they  were  sometimes  represented 
as  acts  of  hypocrisy,  which  ought  not  to  be  relied  on  ; 
sometimes  as  indications  of  fear,  which  should  encour- 
age that  order  to  rise  in  their  demands.  De  Molleville 
did  not  like  the  look  of  things  at  all.  The  most  inflam- 
matory pamphlets  against  the  clergy  and  the  nobility 
were  circulated  through  the  whole  kingdom  without  the 
least  opposition  ;  the  most  shameful  caricatures,  ex- 
posed to  view  in  the  squares,  on  the  quays,  and  at  the 
print-shops  in  Paris,  excited  the  crowds  they  collected 
to  insult  not  only  the  ecclesiastics,  but  every  well-dressed 
man  who  happened  to  be  passing.  It  was  a  terrible 
time  for  the  De  Mollevilles. 

Bouille,  too,  was  much  alarmed  at  the  turn  things 
were  taking,  though  he  was  intelligent  enough  to  see 
that  so  totally  was  every  principle  of  the  Old  Order 
crumbling  that  the  public  mind  was  already  democrat- 
ical,  while  the  monarchy  still  existed.  He  could  see 
that  neither  Notables  nor  States-General  might  avail 
while  the  magistracy  was  ambitious,  while  the  clergy 
were  jealous  of  their  privileges,  while  a  spirit  of  inno- 
vation prevailed  among  the  nobility,  while  there  was 
a  total  want  of  subordination  in  the  army,  while  licen- 


288  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

tiousness  and  insolence  pervaded  the  middle  ranks  of 
society,  while  the  lower  class  experienced  the  extreme 
of  misery,  and  the  rich  indulged  themselves  in  the  most 
unbounded  luxury.  But  he  was  also  intelligent  enough, 
and  enough  attached  to  his  order,  to  see  that  there  were 
possible  consequences  of  the  grimmest  kind  in  what 
Necker  was  about  to  do.  He  had  a  talk  with  Necker 
in  January,  1789.  He  represented  to  Necker  with  force 
and  with  truth  the  danger  of  assembling  the  States- 
General  in  the  manner  he  intended.  He  told  him  that 
he  was  arming  the  people  against  the  first  orders  of  the 
state,  and  that,  when  thus  delivered  up  unarmed,  they 
would  soon  feel  the  effect  of  their  vengeance,  urged  on 
by  the  two  most  active  passions  of  the  human  heart, 
interest  and  self-love.  Enthusiastic  Bouille  even  entered 
into  particulars,  but  Necker  coldly  answered,  raising 
his  eyes  to  heaven,  that  it  was  necessary  to  rely  on  the 
moral  virtues  of  mankind.  Bouille  replied  that  this 
was  a  fine  romance,  but  he  would  see  a  horrible  and 
bloody  tragedy,  unless  he  were  wise  enough  to  avoid 
the  catastrophe.  At  this  Necker  smiled,  and  said  that 
such  apprehensions  were  extravagant. 

As  if  to  confute  Necker,  however,  the  populace  of 
Paris  began  to  make  a  display  of  that  ungoverned 
and  riotous  disposition  which  afterwards  made  them  so 
grimly  conspicuous.  A  miiltitude  of  people  assembled, 
seemingly  for  sport,  about  the  Pont  Neuf,  where  they 
amused  themselves  harmlessly  enough  for  some  time 
with  dancing,  with  throwing  squibs  and  crackers,  and 
obliging  the  passers-by  to  take  off  their  hats  and  bow 
to  the  statue  of  Henry  IV.  They  burned  Brienne  in 
effigy;  they  set  fire  to  a  guard-house;  they  fought  the 
watch.  After  a  while,  however,  they  grew  tired  of 
such  tame  sport.  Lamoignon,  Keeper  of  the  Seals,  had 


1788.  THE   FIRST   SCUFFLE.  289 

just  fallen  from  office.  The  mob  burned  him  too  in  effigy. 
But  by  this  time  they  were  ready  for  graver  work.  La- 
moignon's  hostility  to  the  Parliament  made  him  espe- 
cially obnoxious.  Lighted  torches  were  seized  by  eager 
hands,  and  the  mob  proceeded  in  a  body  to  set  fire  to 
the  residence  of  Lamoignon.  The  timely  interference 
of  the  military  saved  the  house  and  probably  the  life  of 
Lamoignon.  The  French  Guards  and  the  Swiss  Guards 
faced  the  rioters.  The  fury  of  the  mob  was  raised  so 
high  that  they  stood  a  battle  with  the  soldiers,  but  were 
soon  routed,  many  of  their  number  being  killed  and  a 
much  greater  number  undoubtedly  wounded.  So  the 
first  serious  scuffle  between  people  and  soldiery  began 
and  ended. 

Necker's  measure  as  a  statesman  was  never  more 
clearly  shown  than  in  his  report  to  the  king,  which  was 
printed  as  a  supplement  to  the  "  Result  of  the  Council," 
published  on  December  27,  1788.  In  this  report  there 
were  three  points.  Firstly,  Necker  declared  against  the 
advice  of  the  Notables,  that  the  old  States-General  should 
be  exactly  copied,  and  that  every  bailiwick  and  sene- 
schalty  should  return  the  same  number  of  deputies. 
The  effect  of  this  would  only  be,  he  argued,  to  give  ex- 
actly the  same  degree  of  representation  to  constituencies 
with  enormous  populations  and  to  constituencies  where 
the  inhabitants  were  not  a  tithe  of  the  number.  Necker 
next  considered  the  question  of  the  double  representa- 
tion of  the  Tiers  Etat.  He  decided  to  follow  the  exam- 
ple of  Languedoc,  Provence,  Hainault,  and  the  new  as- 
sembly in  Dauphine,  and  to  agree  with  petitions  from 
all  parts  of  the  kingdom,  in  urging  that  the  Third  Estate 
should  have  as  many  representatives  as  the  other  two 
orders  put  together.  Here  he  ran  most  definitely  coun- 
ter to  the  wishes  of  all  that  party  both  in  the  court  and 
I.— 19 


290  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XIX. 

in  the  country  who  wished  to  keep  the  States- General 
narrowly  within  the  limits  that  had  confined  it  in  old 
days  and  under  very  different  conditions.  Finally,  he 
urged  that  the  different  orders  need  not  be  bound  to 
elect  only  members  of  their  own  order.  By  this  pro- 
vision he  hoped  to  enable  the  Third  Estate  to  elect  mem- 
bers of  the  liberal  clergy  and  nobility  for  their  depu- 
ties. The  result  of  the  council  was  based  on  this  report. 
It  decided  that  the  States- General  should  consist  of  a 
thousand  deputies,  elected  in  proportion  to  their  popu- 
lation by  the  various  bailiwicks  and  seneschalties,  in  two 
hundred  and  fifty  deputations  of  four  deputies  each — 
one  for  the  order  of  the  nobility,  one  for  the  clergy,  and 
two  for  the  Third  Estate.  What  was  perhaps  the  most 
important  question  that  agitated  the  public  mind  was 
left  unsettled  by  the  decree.  Nothing  was  said  as  to 
whether  voting  was  to  be  by  order  or  by  head.  The 
privileged  orders  regarded  vote  by  order  as  the  real 
keystone  of  the  difficulty,  arid  the  Third  Estate  per- 
ceived that  their  double  representation  was  of  no  use 
if  it  left  them  with  a  practical  majority  of  two  to  one 
against  them.  It  was  very  characteristic  of  Necker  to 
leave  the  real  crux  of  the  difficulty  to  settle  itself  when 
the  time  came. 

The  publication  of  the  "  Result  of  the  Council "  gave 
rise  to  a  very  deluge  of  pamphlets  of  the  newest  and 
most  approved  democratic  pattern.  Many  were  by  men 
of  great  importance,  whom  we  shall  meet  with  again, 
men  like  Target,  men  like  Brissot  de  Warville,  men, 
above  all,  like  Sieyes.  There  were  others  by  men  of 
less  note,  the  Volneys,  the  Ceruttis  and  their  like,  who 
wrote  and  printed  and  scattered  their  pamphlets  broad- 
cast, as  if  the  welfare  of  France  depended  upon  the 
amount  of  printed  paper  that  was  produced.  But  if 


1788.  THE   END   OF  EIGHTY-EIGHT.  291 

Paris  deluged  the  provinces  with  pamphlets,  the  prov- 
inces in  their  turn  were  not  behindhand  in  the  activity 
of  their  pamphleteers.  Many  of  these  provincial  pam- 
phleteers were  fated  to  be  famous,  if  not  to  be  fortu- 
nate. Most  notable  was  Jean  Paul  Rabaut,  the  Prot- 
estant pastor  whose  "  Desert  name "  of  Saint-Etienne 
recalled  those  evil  days  when  Paul  Rabaut,  his  father, 
was  a  hunted  Huguenot  in  the  wild  Cevennes.  Rabaut 
Saint-Etienne  had  been  many  things  in  his  forty-five 
years  of  life.  He  was  a  scholar  and  a  poet  as  well  as  a 
divine ;  he  had  studied  law ;  he  had  written  a  grim  ro- 
mance ;  he  had  succeeded  in  getting  Louis  XVI.  to  pro- 
pose, and  the  Paris  Parliament  to  register,  an  edict  .of  tol- 
eration for  non-Catholics ;  he  had  written  an  approved 
book  on  early  Greek  history;  he  adored  Lafayette,  Eng- 
land, and  America.  Now  he  had  written  his  pamphlet 
and  joined  the  army  of  politicians.  Rabaut  Saint-Eti- 
enne was  a  well-known  man  when  he  wrote  his  pamphlet 
even  outside  the  circle  of  his  provincial  fame.  There 
were  other  pamphleteers  whose  names  had  hardly  passed 
outside  the  murmur  of  their  rustic  burgh.  One  of  these 
was  a  young  Arras  lawyer  whose  name  will  soon  be 
familiar.  The  pamphleteers  were  all  especially  inter- 
ested in  the  great  question  of  vote  by  order  or  vote  by 
head.  The  popular  mind  dwelt  upon  it,  and  the  innu- 
merable pamphlets  might  have  shown  Necker  the  need 
of  deciding  this  question  at  once.  But  it  is  obvious  to 
those  who  study  Necker's  character  closely  that  to  do 
the  right  thing  at  the  right  moment  was  an  act  entirely 
outside  his  capabilities. 

So  the  year  1788  drifted  to  its  end.  All  through  the 
long  and  bitter  winter  France  that  was  fed  and  clothed 
discussed  the  States-General  with  voice  and  pen,  pour- 
ing out  pamphlet  after  pamphlet,  a  very  wilderness  of 


292  THE  FRENCH    REVOLUTION.  CH.  XIX. 

pamphlets.  France  that  was  not  clothed  and  not  fed 
shivered  and  starved,  and  felt  hungry  and  mutinous. 
The  States-General  were  to  give  it  food  and  clothing, 
no  doubt,  but  in  the  meantime  discontent  was  deepen- 
ing, widening ;  the  forces  of  disaffection  were  fed,  as 
they  always  are  fed,  by  famine.  Over  in  Versailles  an 
amazed  and  angry  court  was  breaking  up  into  desperate 
cabals,  full  of  vague,  uneasy  premonitions,  of  vague, 
uneasy  fears.  The  year  that  now  was  dying  had  been 
an  evil,  ominous  year  for  them.  What  would  the  year 
that  was  about  to  be  hold  in  its  bosom  ? 


1787-89.  ARTHUR   YOUNG'S  ENTERPRISE.  293 


CHAPTER  XX. 

WHAT  ABTHUR  TOUNG    SAW. 

IT  fortunately  pleased  Providence  towards  the  close 
of  the  last  century  to  inspire  a  worthy  Suffolk  gentle- 
man with  a  desire  for  foreign  travel.  The  desire  did 
not  carry  him  very  far,  nor  into  many  very  out-of-the- 
way  places,  if  we  were  to  gauge  his  undertaking  by  the 
standard  of  recent  travel.  But  at  the  time  when,  in  the 
May  of  1787,  Mr.  Arthur  Young  of  Bradfield,  in  Suffolk, 
crossed  the  Channel  and  entered  upon  the  first  of  his 
tours  in  France,  foreign  travel  was  judged  upon  a  very 
different  plane.  It  was  not  then  so  very  far  from  the 
time  when  a  journey  into  Scotland  was  regarded  as  an 
adventure  as  perilous  as  an  expedition  into  Central  Af- 
rica ;  and  though  the  Grand  Tour  had  made  Paris  as 
familiar  as  London  to  most  gentlemen  of  fashion,  it  was 
still  possible  for  the  Suffolk  farmer  to  look  upon  his 
travels  in  France  as  something  in  the  nature  of  an  en- 
terprise. An  enterprise  indeed  it  was,  and  destined  to 
prove  momentous  to  history  and  to  literature.  Arthur 
Young  crossed  the  English  Channel  to  make  a  personal 
inspection  of  the  agricultural  condition  of  France.  This 
was  what  he  proposed  to  do.  What  he  actually  accom- 
plished was  to  put  on  record  the  most  valuable  account 
of  the  political  and  social  condition  of  France  during 
the  most  important  period  'of  her  history.  What  was 
intended  as  a  series  of  notes  for  the  instruction  of  the 
British  farmer  ended  by  becoming  one  of  the  most  pre- 


294  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

cious  contributions  to  historical  and  political  literature 
ever  penned.  Arthur  Young's  travels  in  France  during 
the  years  1787,  1788,  and  1789  convey  the  most  perfect 
and  accurate  picture  of  France  under  the  Old  Order, 
and  France  in  the  very  dawn  of  the  Revolution,  that 
exists.  It  would  hardly  be  unfair  to  say  that  the  stu- 
dent would  know  more  of  the  France  of  that  most  mo- 
mentous time  by  knowing  Arthur  Young  well,  and  not 
knowing  any  of  all  the  vast  number  of  other  books  on 
the  subject,  than  by  knowing  all  the  other  books  and 
not  knowing  Arthur  Young. 

"That  wise  and  honest  traveller,"  Mr.  John  Morley 
calls  him.  It  is  one  of  those  felicities  for  which  Mr. 
Morley  is  celebrated.  He  was  very  wise,  was  Arthur 
Young,  wise  with  the  wisdom  of  the  brilliant  age  which 
boasted  still  of  the  genius  of  Burke,  of  Fox;  he  was 
very  honest,  with  the  austere  and  flawless  honesty  which 
might  have  made  him  a  great  statesman,  and  which,  at 
all  events,  made  him  a  great  man.  Somebody  has  well 
said  that  gentlemen  are  gentlemen  all  the  world  over ; 
all  that  is  necessary  to  make  a  man  a  gentleman  is  that 
he  should  be  honest  and  brave  and  kind.  Arthur  Young 
was  all  of  these ;  the  term  "  Gentleman  Farmer "  was 
never  more  happily  applied  since  man  first  abandoned 
the  acorn  and  turned  to  the  service  of  Ceres.  There 
was  a  high  heroic  strain  about  his  bravery  which  in  other 
conditions  would  have  made  him  a  gallant  soldier — a 
Wolfe  or  a  Clive.  When  he  was  at  the  Duke  de  Lian- 
court's,  in  1787,  he  inspected  the  school  for  training  the 
orphans  of  soldiers  to  be  soldiers  themselves.  "  There 
are  at  present  one  hundred  and  twenty  boys,  all  dressed 
in  uniform.  My  ideas  have  all  taken  a  turn  which  I  am 
too  old  to  change  :  I  should  have  been  better  pleased 
to  see  one  hundred  and  twenty  lads  educated  to  the 


1787-89.  ARTHUR  YOUNG'S  STRUGGLES.  295 

plough,  in  habits  of  culture  superior  to  the  present ;  but 
certainly  the  establishment  is  humane  and  the  conduct 
of  it  excellent."  Yet  one  feels  that  it  was  but  a  turn 
of  the  wheel  under  Fortune's  hand,  and  Arthur  Young 
would  have  made  as  sterling  a  soldier  as  ever  followed 
the  colors  in  some  great  campaign.  His  amazing  cour- 
age and  coolness  under  trying  and  even  dangerous  con- 
ditions in  France,  when  the  revolutionary  fever  was  first 
hot,  have  in  them  something  of  the  man  of  the  sword 
rather  than  the  man  of  the  plough ;  they  smack  of  the 
camp  rather  than  the  farm.  But  what  most  of  all  shows 
the  true  heroic  temper  of  the  man  is  the  way  in  which 
he  waged,  all  through  his  life,  a  war  with  iron  fortune, 
losing  again  and  again  in  his  magnificent  farming  ex- 
periments and  always  returning  to  the  charge,  heedless 
of  poverty,  heedless  of  ruin,  with  all  the  fine  audacity 
of  some  gallant  of  the  Old  Guard. 

It  is  encouraging  to  think  of  Arthur  Young,  of  his 
struggles,  his  courage,  his  simple  patriotism.  To  say 
that  his  life  was  not  all  happy  is  to  say  that  he  was 
mortal,  and  shared  the  lot  of  mortals.  But,  upon  the 
whole,  he  must  be  accounted  happy  ;  for  he  was  a  good 
man  and  did  good  things.  His  married  life  was  not 
happy  ;  the  loss  of  his  beautiful  and  beloved  daughter, 
the  "Bobbin"  of  so  many  affectionate  allusions  in  his 
letters,  plunged  his  later  years  into  grief.  There  are 
few  more  tragical  things  in  their  quiet  way  than  the 
description  Arthur  Young  gives  of  a  visit  to  Burke 
in  Burke's  decline,  when  grief  for  the  loss  of  Richard 
Burke  has  well-nigh  broken  Burke's  mighty  heart,  and 
Arthur  Young  feels  a  kind  of  heroic  pity  for  the  great 
man  thus  desperately  brought  low,  and  rides  serenely 
away.  And  then  his  own  great  gi'ief  and  loss  comes 
upon  him,  and  he  is  as  despaii'ing,  as  dejected  and 


296  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

wretched,  as  Burke  himself.  It  is  a  sermon,  a  very  old, 
familiar  sermon  ;  but  it  comes  home  to  us  with  a  pecul- 
iar keenness  when  two  great  men  give  out  the  text  for 
it.  Blindness  came  upon  Arthur  Young's  eve  of  life,  as 
it  came  upon  that  of  Milton  ;  and  he  bore  his  affliction 
with  a  dignified,  a  religious  resignation.  The  happy 
things  in  his  life  were  his  hopes,  his  honest,  patriotic 
ambitions,  his  travels,  and  his  friends.  He  had  many 
friends  ;  the  pathway  of  his  life  was  happily  starred 
with  them.  Wherever  he  went  he  made  friends.  The 
Burneys  were  very  fond  of  him,  father  and  daughter. 
It  is  a  bright  picture  that  Fanny  Burney  paints  of  a 
visit  one  day  from  Arthur  Young,  "most  absurdly 
dressed  for  a  common  visit,  being  in  light  blue,  embroid- 
ered with  silver,  having  a  bag  and  sword,  and  walk- 
ing in  the  rain."  "  He  was  grown  all  airs  and  affecta- 
tions," she  adds,  "yet  I  believe  this  was  put  on — for 
what  purpose  I  cannot  tell,  unless  it  were  to  let  us  see 
what  a  power  for  transformation  he  possessed."  It  is 
pleasant  to  think  of  famous  Arthur  Young  in  all  this 
foppish  fantasy. 

It  is,  however,  Arthur  Young,  the  traveller,  and  Ar- 
thur Young,  the  traveller  in  France,  who  most  interests 
us  in  this  anniversary  of  the  Revolution.  What  lifelike, 
brilliant  pictures  he  draws  of  all  he  sees  !  how  skil- 
fully and  intelligently  he  records  all  that  he  hears ! 
There  never  was  another  traveller  like  him  in  the 
world,  since  the  days  of  dear  Herodotus,  for  a  keen 
eye  and  a  clever  pen.  All  the  rural  France  of  the 
Old  Order  comes  up  before  us,  as  we  read,  as  clearly  as 
if  evoked  by  the  wave  of  a  wizard's  wand.  We  shud- 
der as  we  cross  with  him  the  threshold  of  the  foul, 
unlovely  inns  against  whose  dirt  and  discomfort  he  is 
never  tired  of  inveighing  with  a  kind  of  whimsical  fe- 


1787-89.        ME  CHARM  OF  YOtfNG'S  fRAVELg.  297 

rocity  which  is  exquisitely  entertaining.  We  smile  at 
his  satirical  emphasis  upon  the  provincial  ignorance  of 
events,  upon  the  dearth  of  journalism,  upon  the  irritat- 
ing precautions  and  formalities  with  which  the  new  au- 
thorities of  the  Third  Estate  occasionally  hobbled  his 
wandering  footsteps.  We  see  Paris  rise  up  before  us, 
the  Paris  of  1789,  which  M.  Babeau  has  been  lately  de- 
scribing, and  it  seems  more  familiar  to  us  than  the  Paris 
of  to-day.  But  the  especial  charm  of  the  travels  lies  in 
the  portraits  they  paint,  as  their  especial  value  lies  in 
the  studies  of  social  and  political  life  they  present.  His 
testimony  to  the  beauty  of  Marie  Antoinette  is  an  in- 
teresting supplement  to  Burke's  ;  his  sketch  of  the  ex- 
cellent Duke  de  Liancourt,  who  competed  with  the  Duke 
de  Penthievre  for  the  honor  of  being  considered  the 
best  of  the  nobility,  is  one  of  the  most  admirable  his- 
torical sketches  extant.  Arthur  Young  was  a  man  who 
must  have  adorned  any  age.  It  is  a  special  gratification 
to  us  to  reflect  that  he  belonged  to  the  age  which  gave 
birth  to  the  French  Revolution.  We  are  better  able  to 
understand  that  woi-ld-disturbing  portent  by  the  illu- 
mination of  his  fine  intelligence. 

In  a  very  poor  book  by  a  very  able  man,  the  "  Ancien 
Regime  "  of  Charles  Kingsley,  the  author  is  pleased  to 
imagine  that  he  discerns  the  whole  of  the  Old  Order  in 
one  book  ;  and  that  book  is — it  seemed  incredible  to 
read,  it  seems  almost  too  incredible  to  repeat — "  Gil 
Bias."  Of  "Gil  Bias"  Charles  Kingsley  has  written 
some  very  wild  and  whirling  words,  sufficiently  regret- 
table to  peruse.  A  critic  who  declares  with  all  serious- 
ness that  he  could  "  recommend  no  human  being "  to 
read  it,  who  finds  it  merely  a  "collection  of  diseased 
specimens,"  is  scarcely  worth  considering  with  gravity 
when  he  pronounces  that  it  is  also  "the  'Ancien  Re- 


298  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

gime '  itself."  Statements  of  this  kind  pass  beyond  the 
limits  of  the  eccentric  into  the  region  of  the  absurd. 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  the  Old  Order  in  "  Gil  Bias," 
because  "  Gil  Bias  "  was  written  in  the  days  of  the  Old 
Order,  and  Le  Sage  was  a  man  who  knew  how  to  use 
his  eyes.  But  it  would  be  as  unreasonable  to  expect  to 
find  the  whole  of  the  Old  Order  in  "  Gil  Bias "  as  it 
would  be  to  find  it  in  the  book  which  Kingsley  some- 
what absurdly  puts  into  contrast  with  it — "  Telemaque." 
There  was  more  in  the  Old  Order  for  good  and  evil,  and 
very  certainly  for  evil,  than  is  to  be  found  within  the 
fascinating  pages  of  the  great  novel.  The  man  who 
could  say  that  "  the  most  notable  thing  about  the  book 
is  its  intense  stupidity  ;  its  dreariness,  barrenness,  shal- 
lowness,  ignorance  of  the  human  heart,  want  of  any  hu- 
man interest,"  is  out  of  court  at  once  as  an  authority  or 
a  critic.  Such  a  man  might  find  the  "  Ancien  Regime  " 
or  the  Baconian  cipher  in  Le  Sage's  masterpiece.  The 
student  who  wants  to  understand  what  the  Old  Order 
was  like  in  France  will  waste  no  time  in  whimsies  about 
"  Gil  Bias  ;"  he  will  plunge  deeply  into  the  pages  of 
Arthur  Young. 

It  is  curiously  difficult  to  get  anything  like  a  really 
comprehensive  and  exhaustive  knowledge  of  the  exact 
condition  of  the  surviving  inheritances  of  the  feudal 
system  which  constituted  what  we  have  called  the  Old 
Order  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XVI.  But  we  can  at  least 
see  how  it  looked  to  the  eyes  of  Arthur  Young.  The 
extraordinary  absence  of  any  coherent  system  in  the 
whole  social  arrangement  of  the  country  makes  any 
study  of  the  time  the  most  perplexing  of  tasks.  We 
seem,  like  the  hero  of  some  fairy-tale,  to  be  wandering 
in  an  enchanted  wood,  from  which  it  is  impossible  to 
extricate  ourselves,  and  in  which  it  is  impossible  to 


1787-89.  THE   FEUDAL  SYSTEM.  299 

find  a  direct  or  serviceable  path.  In  vain  we  hew  our 
way,  lopping  down  difficulties  right  and  left ;  the 
broken  branches  grow  again  with  Hydra  activity,  and 
the  entanglements  of  the  maze  become  more  embarrass- 
ing than  before.  The  complete  confusion  of  what  may 
be  called  the  local  government  of  the  time  is  one  of  the 
most  difficult  factors  of  the  problem.  The  various  pro- 
vincial administrations,  offspring  of  time  and  chance, 
were  conceived  on  no  uniform  plan,  bore  no  relation- 
ship whatever  to  a  common  whole,  and  were  frequently 
in  themselves  little  centres  of  chaotic  agglomeration  of 
obsolete  traditions  and  conflicting  systems.  Many  of 
the  provinces  hardly  knew  how  they  were  governed,  and 
were  driven  to  address  the  fountain  of  authority  for  in- 
formation of  the  most  rudimentary  kind  as  to  the  very 
principles  of  their  own  political  existence. 

Nor  were  the  principles  of  what  has  been  called  the 
feudal  system  less  complicated  and  less  conflicting.  It 
is  scarcely  to  be  wondered  at  that  a  system  should  be  in- 
volved in  such  murky  obscurity  when  we  remember  that 
the  very  essence  of  the  system  was  to  permit  to  every  in- 
dividual lord  an  amount  of  authority  over  his  own  do- 
mains which  was  a  little  short  of  regal.  The  king  himself 
had  no  power  to  intervene  between  one  of  these  little 
feudal  kings  and  his  vassals.  Monarch  after  monarch 
had  essayed  in  vain  to  break  down  this  barrier  between 
themselves  and  the  seignorial  authority,  and  at  last  had 
given  up  the  struggle  in  despair.  Even  when,  in  1779, 
the  royal  edict  abolished  servitude  and  main  mort  in 
the  crown-lands,  the  language  of  the  law  expressly  set 
forth  that  it  had  no. power  to  enforce  the  decree  upon 
the  territories  of  the  feudal  nobility.  Thus,  at  the 
year  1789,  we  find  this  extraordinary  feudal  system,  or 
want  of  system,  making  the  whole  social  administra- 


300  fflfi  FllENCH  DEVOLUTION.  On.  XX. 

tion  of  France  as  bewildering  as  a  child's  puzzle  and  as 
logical  as  an  idiot's  dream.  Bound  by  no  rational  laws, 
obedient  to  no  principles,  to  no  theories  save  those  of 
individual  pleasure  and  independent,  isolated  authority, 
the  feudal  system,  a  system  of  chaos  within  chaos,  con- 
verted France  into  such  an  assemblage  of  disorders  as 
the  world  has  never  seen  before  or  since.  No  East- 
ern empire,  under  whatever  network  of  satrapies  and 
pashaliks,  ever  displayed  a  more  grotesque  incohe- 
rence, a  more  helpless  and  hopeless  muddle  than  poor 
France  displayed  under  the  dying  days  of  the  Old  Or- 
der— those  days  when  Arthur  Young  was  riding  on  her 
highways,  and  weighing  all  things  with  his  keen,  atten- 
tive mind. 

If  the  rights  of  each  great  lord  over  his  own  lands 
were  practically  unimpeachable  by  the  king  himself,  it 
did  not  follow  that  the  rights  of  one  great  lord  were 
necessarily  the  same  as  those  of  another  great  lord. 
The  rules  which  governed  each  great  domain,  and  which 
regulated  the  relationships  of  lord  and  vassal,  of  sire 
and  serf,  had  grown  up  like  plants  of  the  soil  in  their 
own  way,  and  under  their  own  conditions,  unaffected  by 
the  ways  and  conditions  of  other  places.  Just  as  one 
field  grew  grass  and  another  clover,  so  one  great  terri- 
tory grew  one  set  of  laws,  customs,  and  institutions, 
and  another  great  territory  other  quite  different  regu- 
lations. 

Seldom,  therefore,  in  the  whole  history  of  humanity 
was  a  more  curious  structure  offered  to  the  scrutiny  of 
mankind  than  the  so-called  social  system  of  France 
under  the  Old  Order  towards  the  autumn  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  offered  to  the  scrutiny  of  Arthur  Young. 
That  the  supporters  of  such  a  system — the  persons  who 
profited  by  it,  adored  it,  and  fostered  it — could  have  se- 


1789.  THE   SOCIAL   PYRAMID.  301 

riously  believed  in  its  stability  and  its  power  of  perma- 
nent endurance  is  one  of  the  most  signal  examples  of 
purblind  power  whereof  the  world  holds  record.  The 
"  Panurge  "  of  Frai^ois  Rabelais  and  the  "  Elia  "  of 
Charles  Lamb  genially  and  jocularly  divide  all  man- 
kind into  the  Borrowers  and  the  Lenders,  the  Debtors 
and  the  Creditors.  Such  a  jesting-cap-and-bells  divis- 
ion of  the  human  family  is  scarcely  more  grotesque 
than  the  actual  division  which  existed  in  France  under 
the  Old  Order.  It  was  the  case  of  the  Haves  and 
Have-Nots  over  again.  The  population  of  France  was, 
roughly  speaking,  divided  into  two  lots  —  the  privi- 
leged and  the  unprivileged  classes.  The  former,  as 
compared  with  the  whole  bulk,  was  but  a  handful  of 
men.  The  latter  was  composed  of  what  may  be  called 
the  French  nation.  The  apex  of  the  social  pyramid  was 
formed  by  the  greatest  and  the  least  of  all  the  orders, 
by  the  king.  The  nobility  came  next,  a  shadow  of  an- 
tique feudalism.  The  Church,  with  its  far-reaching  in- 
fluence and  comprehensive  dominion,  formed  the  next 
grade  of  the  pyramid.  Then  came  the  widening  base 
of  plebeians,  themselves  divided,  the  bourgeoisie  rich 
or  poor,  the  peasantry.  There  were  even  still  actual 
serfs,  as  at  Saint-Claude,  in  the  Jura.  But  the  privi- 
leged orders  were  the  governors  ;  all  the  rest  were  the 
governed.  The  man  whom  low  birth  and  iron  fortune 
set  apart  from  the  privileged  orders  might  till  the 
ground  or  drive  a  quill  or  follow  the  drum,  might  live 
and  breed  and  die  as  he  pleased  ;  but  he  had  scarcely 
more  share  in  the  administration  of  the  laws,  scarcely 
more  influence  upon  the  makers  of  the  laws,  scarcely 
more  right  to  be  heard  in  protest  against  them  or  judg- 
ment upon  them,  than  if  he  lived  in  Mars  or  Saturn  in- 
stead of  Franche  Comte  or  Picardy. 


302  THE  FRENCII   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

Let  us  take  a  map  of  France,  of  the  France  in  which 
Arthur  Young  is  now  in  our  fancy  wandering,  that  old 
feudal  France,  with  its  ancient  divisions  into  provinces, 
and  look  at  it.  Of  all  that  fair  land  from  north  to  south 
and  from  east  to  west,  a  half  belonged  to  the  king,  the 
nobility,  and  the  Church.  The  nobility  and  the  clergy, 
apart  from  the  king  and  the  communes,  owned  each  a 
fifth  part  of  the  soil  of  France,  a  fifth  remained  for  the 
middle  class,  a  fifth  for  the  peasantry.  According  to 
Taine,  the  nobility  in  France,  just  before  the  Revolu- 
tion, numbered  one  hundred  and  forty  thousand,  and 
the  clergy  about  one  hundred  and  thirty  thousand. 
This  sum  of  two  hundred  and  seventy  thousand,  when 
resolved  into  its  component  parts,  consisted  of  some 
twenty-five  thousand  to  thirty  thousand  noble  families, 
and  some  twenty-three  thousand  monks  in  two  thou- 
sand five  hundred  monasteries,  thirty-seven  thousand 
nuns  in  one  thousand  five  hundred  convents,  and  some 
sixty  thousand  cures  and  vicars  in  as  many  churches 
and  chapels.  These  two  orders,  who  were  in  a  propor- 
tion of  about  one  to  one  hundred  of  the  population, 
owned,  if  the  public  lands  are  deducted,  nearly  half 
France. 

And  this  monstrous  cantle,  it  must  be  remembered, 
was  the  best  part  of  the  kingdom.  Upon  the  portion  of 
the  two  privileged  orders  were  practically  all  the  rich- 
est and  most  stately  buildings,  all  the  plate  in  precious 
metal,  all  the  works  of  art,  all  the  things  in  fact  that 
constitute  the  wealth  and  luxury  of  a  great  state.  The 
wealth  of  the  two  orders  was  enormous.  The  property 
of  the  clergy  has  been  valued  at  nearly  four  billions  of 
francs,  and  their  income,  including  .tithes,  reached  the 
stupendous  sum  of  two  hundred  millions.  Vast  as  this 
wealth  seems,  it  was  in  reality  vaster.  Money  was 


1789.  PLEASANT   PRIVILEGES.  303 

worth  practically  twice  as  much  then  as  it  is  worth 
now  ;  to  get  an  approximation  to  the  modern  value  of 
such  sums  we  must  double  the  total.  Nor  were  the 
nobles  behindhand  in  wealth  and  splendor.  The  ap- 
panages of  the  princes  of  the  blood  royal  covered  one 
seventh  of  the  surface  of  France.  The  Duke  of  Orleans 
boasted  of  an  income  of  nearly  twelve  million  livres  a 
year.  The  temporal  princes  and  the  princes  of  the 
Church  competed  with  each  other  in  magnificence  of  in- 
come, in  extent  of  their  authority,  over  those  unhappy 
drudges  who  were  the  people  of  France  and  whom  the 
old  order  regarded  but  as  the  helots  of  a  picked  aristoc- 
racy. 

The  nobles  and  the  clergy  were  practically  exempt 
from  all  contribution  to  the  State.  Nobles  did  not  pay 
"any  direct  taxes  in  the  same  proportion  as  their  fellow- 
subjects,  and  in  the  case  of  the  taille,  their  privilege  ap- 
proached very  nearly  to  entire  exemption.  The  nobles 
had  the  pleasing  privilege  of  appraising  their  own  taxa- 
tion, and  the  financial  statement  of  a  noble  was  never 
inquired  into.  To  question  the  veracity  of  a  noble 
would  be  to  strike  at  the  sublime  perfection  of  the 
whole  social  system  ;  it  would  be  an  indirect  insult  to 
the  king,  who  was  himself  only  the  noblest  of  the  nobles. 
"  I  pay  pretty  well  what  I  please,"  the  Duke  of  Orleans 
boasted,  in  his  pleasant,  straightforward  way  ;  and  what 
the  Duke  of  Orleans  said  aloud  the  rest  of  the  nobility 
said  beneath  their  breaths,  or  in  their  hearts,  as  they 
followed  his  illustrious  example.  The  clergy  were,  if 
anything,  a  trifle  more  fortunate.  Except  in  a  few 
frontier  provinces,  they  paid  personally  no  direct  taxes 
whatever.  They  had  so  ingeniously  arranged  matters 
to  please  themselves  that  they  had  converted  their  share 
of  contributions  to  the  State  into  a  "free  gift,"  the 


304  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

amount  of  which  was  left  entirely  to  their  own  discre- 
tion and  generosity.  It  is  the  oddest  comment  upon 
their  discretion  to  note  that  in  the  year  1789,  the  year 
of  doom,  they  absolutely  refused  to  make  any  gift  at 
all.  Nay  more,  there  were  actually  occasions  upon 
which  they  induced  the  king  to  give  them  something 
from  the  public  treasury,  bleeding  to  death  as  it  was 
from  a  thousand  wounds. 

Nor  were  such  exemptions  limited  to  the  clergy  and 
the  nobility.  The  bourgeoisie,  although  they  were  de- 
spised by  the  two  great  orders,  might  obtain  certain  of 
their  privileges  by  paying  heavily  for  them.  Those 
who  could  acquired  by  purchase  the  rank  and  privileges 
of  nobles.  In  this  way  a  nobility  of  office  and  royal  crea- 
tion had  come  into  existence,  which,  although  scorned 
by  the  old  nobility  of  the  sword,  enjoyed  the  same  pe- 
cuniary immunities.  Even  those  who  had  not  thus 
bought  nobility  were  themselves  privileged  to  no  incon- 
siderable extent.  By  living  in  towns,  merchants,  shop- 
keepers, and  professional  men  were  able  to  avoid  serv- 
ing in  the  militia  and  collecting  the  faille,  from  which, 
in  the  country,  nobles  alone  were  free.  They  also  pur- 
chased petty  offices  created  by  government  in  order  that 
they  might  be  sold,  offices  with  sham  duties  which  con- 
ferred on  the  holders  partial  exemption  from  payment 
of  the  taille  and  of  excise  duties,  and  other  privileges 
of  a  like  character.  It  was  an  amazingly  pleasant  time 
for  the  handful  of  men  who  held  France  beneath  their 
feet ;  it  was  a  time  terrible  almost  beyond  description 
for  the  millions  who  toiled  and  spun  that  the  lilies  of 
Court  and  Church  might  flourish. 

If  taxation  was  thus  oppressive,  thus  unjustly  dis- 
tributed between  classes,  it  was  made  more  oppressive 
still  by  the  nature  of  some  of  the  taxes,  by  the  manner 


1789.  GAI3ELLE  AND   TAILLE.  305 

of  their  assessment  and  collection,  by  the  want  of  all 
administrative  unity.  France  was  starred  with  custom- 
houses and  tolls  which  hampered  trade,  fostered  smug- 
gling, and  raised  the  price  of  all  the  necessaries  of  life. 
Excise  duties  were  laid  on  articles  of  daily  need,  such 
as  candles,  fuel,  wine,  grain,  and  flour.  Goods  which 
might  have  travelled  in  three  weeks  from  Provence  to 
Normandy  took  three  and  a  half  months,  through  the 
delays  caused  by  the  imposition  of  duties.  Artisans, 
for  example,  who  had  to  cross  a  river  on  their  way  to 
their  work  were  often  met  by  customs  duties  which 
they  had  to  pay  on  tlie  food  which  they  carried  in  their 
pockets.  Some  provinces  and  towns  were  privileged  in 
relation  to  certain  taxes,  and  as  a  rule  it  was  the  poorest 
provinces  on  which  the  heaviest  burdens  lay.  One  of 
the  most  evil  of  the  taxes  was  the  gabelle,  or  tax  on 
salt,  which,  as  we  shall  see,  aroused  the  indignation  of 
Arthur  Young.  Of  this  tax,  which  was  farmed,  two 
thirds  of  the  whole  were  levied  on  a  third  of  the  king- 
dom. There  were  special  courts  for  the  punishment  of 
those  who  disobeyed  fiscal  regulations  of  the  most  mi- 
nute and  grotesque  kind.  Throughout  the  north  and 
centre  of  France  the  gabelle  was  in  reality  a  poll  tax. 
The  sale  of  salt  was  a  monopoly  in  the  hands  of  the 
farmers,  who  had  behind  them  a  small  army  of  officials 
for  the  suppression  of  smuggling,  or  using  other  salt 
than  that  sold  by  them.  Every  person  aged  above  seven 
years  was  forced  to  purchase  seven  pounds  yearly, 
though  the  price  varied  so  much  that  the  same  meas- 
ure which  cost  a  few  shillings  in  one  province  cost  two 
or  three  pounds  in  another.  Yet  this  salt  might  be  used 
for  cooking  purposes,  and  cooking  purposes  alone.  The 
fisherman  who  wished  to  salt  his  catch,  the  farmer  who 
wished  to  salt  his  pork,  must  buy  more  salt  and  obtain 
I.— 20 


306  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

a  certificate  that  they  had  bought  more  salt.  The  ex- 
chequers were  swollen,  the  galleys  were  manned,  the 
gallows  were  weighted  yearly  with  the  fines  of  purse  or 
of  person  paid  by  the  victims  of  this  odious  tax.  But 
the  gabelle  was  not  the  only  infliction.  There  was  the 
faille,  the  first  of  the  property  taxes,  the  taille  that  was 
as  cruel  as  the  gabelle,  and  as  fatal  to  agriculture.  It 
was  fantastically  reassessed  every  year,  not  according 
to  any  regular  economic  rule,  but  according  to  that 
more  Oriental  plan  which  varies  its  taxation  with  the 
varying  fortunes  of  the  place  or  person  taxed.  The 
over-taxed  victims  soon  discovered  that  the  smallest  in- 
dication of  prosperity  meant  an  increase  in  the  amount 
of  the  tax.  Under  its  blight  farmer  after  farmer  and 
parish  after  parish  were  degraded  to  a  common  ruin  and 
a  common  despair. 

The  privileges  of  the  great  lords  of  the  noble  and 
clerical  orders  were  imperial  in  their  magnificence,  re- 
calling something  of  the  opulence  of  Oriental  satraps. 
The  Archbishop  of  Cambray,  who  was  at  the  same  time 
a  duke  and  a  count,  possessed  the  suzerainty  of  all  the 
fiefs  in  a  region  containing  some  seventy-five  thousand 
inhabitants.  He  named  half  the  aldermen  of  Cambray. 
He  named  the  entire  administrative  body  of  Cateau. 
He  named  the  abbots  of  two  large  abbeys.  He  pre- 
sided over  the  provincial  assembly  and  the  permanent 
bureau  which  succeeded  it.  Near  him  in  Hainault  the 
Abbe  of  Saint- Amand  owned  seven  eighths  of  the  terri- 
tory of  the  provostship,  levied  on  the  remainder  the 
seignorial  taxes,  corvees,  and  dime,  and  named  the  pro- 
vost of  the  aldermen.  Something  of  the  lost  sovereignty 
of  prince  and  prelate  still  lingered  in  these  astonishing 
privileges.  A  large  number  of  the  bishops  were  spir- 
itual as  well  as  temporal  lords  in  part,  and  in  certain 


1789.  PETTY  SOVEREIGNS.  307 

cases  in  the  whole  of  their  episcopal  cities.  Some  no- 
bles, too,  wielded  authority  almost  like  viceroys.  Cer- 
tain great  houses  had  the  right  to  collect  for  themselves 
the  aides,  or  taxes  on  wines  and  liquors,  gold  and  silver, 
cards,  paper,  starch,  manufacture  of  iron  and  steel,  and 
the  like.  Lesser  lords  had  their  rights  too.  Such  a 
lord  had  often  the  power  of  nominating  the  cure,  the 
bailiff,  the  clerk  of  the  court,  the  notaries  and  other 
officials ;  had  his  private  prison,  and  sometimes  his  pri- 
vate scaffold.  The  property  of  any  man  under  his  juris- 
diction who  was  condemned  to  death  was  confiscated  to 
him  ;  all  lands  which  had  lain  uncultivated  for  ten  years 
were  swept  by  a  similar  process  of  confiscation  into  his 
net.  He  claimed  and  took  toll  upon  the  sale  of  land  to 
the  extent  of  a  sixth,  a  fifth,  and  sometimes  even  a 
fourth  of  the  price,  and  performed  the  like  feat  when 
land  was  rented  for  more  than  nine  years.  Then  the 
tolls  he  levied  were  comprehensive  and  cruel.  In  1724 
the  king  had  abolished  some  twelve  hundred  of  these 
tolls,  but  enough  remained  to  make  the  lives  of  the 
peasants  most  miserable,  and  to  make  us  wonder  how 
they  existed  at  all  under  heavier  inflictions.  On  the 
bridges,  the  roads,  the  ferries,  the  boats  ascending  and 
descending  the  water-ways,  the  grasping  lord  laid  his 
toll.  The  drover  with  his  horses  and  kine,  his  sheep 
and  swine,  the  carrier  with  his  merchandise,  the  farmer 
with  his  provisions  in  his  cart,  had  to  pay,  and  pay  stiffly, 
for  the  privilege  of  treading  the  lord's  high-road  and 
passing  within  the  shadow  of  the  lord's  chateau.  The 
privilege  of  sale  at  his  fairs  or  markets  had  to  be  paid 
for.  No  one  could  eat,  drink,  or  dress  without  paying 
for  the  privilege  to  the  lord  of  the  land.  To  bleed  the 
luckless  peasantry  further,  the  noble  set  up  his  great 
ovens,  his  wine  -  presses,  his  mills,  and  his  slaughter- 


308  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

houses,  and  condemned  the  poor  wretches  under  his  do- 
minion to  have  their  bread  baked,  their  wine  made,  their 
corn  ground,  and  their  cattle  killed  at  his  buildings,  and 
to  pay  heavily  for  that  too.  Every  deed  of  the  peas- 
ant's life  owed  its  tax  to  the  lord  ;  every  fruit  of  the 
peasant's  labor  yielded  its  due  to  the  lord.  If  the  avari- 
cious noble  could  have  seen  his  way  to  taxing  the  very 
air  the  peasant  breathed,  he  would  have  done  so  and 
rejoiced  thereat. 

It  would  be  hard  to  say  what  rights  the  peasant  did 
possess  beyond  the  grudgingly  accorded  right  to  live. 
Wretched  as  his  land  was — for  the  fattest  land  went 
for  farms  for  the  privileged  orders — he  could  not  deal 
with  it  as  he  pleased.  He  could  not  sow,  he  could  not 
reap,  according  to  his  own  pleasure  ;  meadowings  had 
to  remain  meadowings,  and  tilled  land  tilled  land.  For 
if  the  peasant  changed  his  field  into  a  meadow  he  de- 
prived the  cure  of  his  dime  ;  if  he  turned  his  meadow 
into  a  field  he  diminished  the  commons ;  if  he  sowed 
clover  he  could  not  prevent  the  flocks  of  the  seigneur 
from  pasturing  thereon.  His  lands  were  encumbered 
with  fruit-trees,  which  were  annually  let  for  the  profit 
of  the  lord  of  the  abbey.  These  trees  were  terrible 
enemies  to  the  peasant.  The  shadow  they  cast,  their 
spreading  roots,  the  annual  injury  caused  by  the  fruit- 
gathering,  all  these  harmed  his  fields,  impeded  his  labor, 
impoverished  his  scanty  substance.  Yet  he  dared  not 
cut  down  one  of  these  trees.  Nay,  more,  if  one  of  them 
perished  by  accident  he  was  bound  to  replace  it  at  his 
own  cost.  The  luckless  fellaheen  of  the  Nile  Valley 
were  not  more  hardly  used.  The  right  of  hunting  was 
a  mark  of  nobility,  and  only  the  noble,  therefore,  had  a 
right  to  hunt.  So  in  the  hunting  season  the  noble  and 
his  friends  followed  their  game  over  the  fields  of  the 


1789.      NOBLES'  RIGHTS  MAKE  PEASANTS'  WRONGS.       309 

peasant,  heedless  of  the  damage  they  wantonly  inflicted 
as  they  pursued  their  privileged  pleasure,  while  the 
peasant  who  killed  any  game,  even  on  his  own  fields, 
put  himself  in  peril  of  the  galleys. 

The  seigneur  too,  and  the  abbey,  had  the  privilege 
of  pasturage  for  their  flocks  an  hour  before  the  villager 
might  venture  to  feed  his  sheep  and  cattle.  Small  won- 
der, therefore,  if,  while  the  droves  and  herds  of  lord 
and  abbot  throve  and  waxed  fat,  the  sheep  and  cattle 
of  the  hind  starved  and  dwindled  and  perished.  But 
perhaps  of  all  the  wrongs,  humiliations,  and  tortures 
which  were  thus  inflicted  by  the  privileged  upon  the 
non-privileged,  that  which  may  be  rendered  the  "right 
of  dovecot^"  was  felt  most  bitterly.  The  nobles  alone 
possessed  the  right  of  owning  pigeons,  and  the  thou- 
sands and  thousands  of  pigeons  which  the  nobles  kept 
fed  upon  the  crops  of  the  peasant,  who  had  to  sow  a 
double  seed  in  the  hope  of  harvest,  and  to  behold  with 
impotent  hate  and  despair  the  dreaded  flocks  feed  upon 
the  grain  his  hand  had  scattered,  while  he  dared  not 
lift  his  hand  to  kill  a  single  one  of  the  birds.  It  was 
almost  as  rash  to  kill  a  pigeon  as  to  kill  a  man,  and  the 
serf,  with  a  raging  heart,  had  to  suffer  in  silence.  There 
will  be  a  great  fluttering  of  dovecotes  by-and-by  when 
the  day  of  reckoning  comes,  and  vast  flights  of  pigeons 
of  a  very  different  kind,  but  the  time  is  not  yet. 

As  the  peasant  man,  so  was  the  peasant  woman.  The 
peasant  girls  of  Greuze's  pictures,  daintily  capped  and 
petticoated,  simply  innocent  in  the  display  of  white 
bosom,  are  the  creations  of  his  canvas,  the  peasant  girls 
of  opera  ballets,  of  courtly  masquerades  at  the  Little 
Trianon.  We  think  of  the  ghastly  creature  whom  Ar- 
thur Young  saw  near  Mars-la-Tour  as  he  was  walking 
a  hill  to  ease  his  horse.  The  haggard,  hungered  wretch, 


310  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

who  looked  some  sixty  or  seventy  years  of  age,  and  was 
some  eight-and- twenty,  who  had  been  harassed  from 
comeliness  to  a  hag  by  years  of  bitter,  grinding  pov- 
erty, hard  work,  and  privation,  she  is  the  true  type  of 
the  peasant  woman  of  the  time.  A  curious  episode 
brings,  in  1789,  the  fiction  and  the  fact  of  peasant  life 
strangely  face  to  face  in  Paris.  Favart,  in  1764,  had 
played  at  the  Comedie  Italienne  a  little  piece  founded 
on  a  story  of  Marmontel's,  and  called  "  Annette  et  Lu- 
.bin."  The  piece  was  one  of  those  pastoralities  in  which 
the  virtuous  loves  of  a  graceful  and  beribboned  peas- 
antry are  duly  crowned  by  fortunate  nuptials.  The 
story  and  the  piece  were  founded  on  fact.  There  was 
a  real  Annette,  there  was  a  real  Lubin,  and^  their  loves 
had  supplied  the  slender  thread  of  story  to  the  piece. 
Paris  was  amused  by  the  piece  ;  Annette  and  Lubin 
were  talked  of  and  thought  of  a  good  deal- — and  then 
quietly  forgotten.  Suddenly,  in  the  April  of  1789,  the 
Journal  de  Paris  made  an  appeal  to  the  Parisian  pub- 
lic. Lubin  and  Annette  had  grown  old,  were  wretch- 
edly poor.  Would  none  of  those  who  had  been  enter- 
tained by  the  story  of  their  simple  loves  assist  them 
now  in  their  wretched  old  age?  Paris  thus  appealed 
to,  the  Paris  of  the  theatres  and  the  salons,  allowed 
itself  to  be  touched.  Subscriptions  poured  in  for  the 
aged  and  destitute  couple,  a  performance  in  their  bene- 
fit was  given  of  "Annette  and  Lubin,"  and  it  is  said 
that  the  real  Annette  and  Lubin  were  themselves  pres- 
ent in  the  theatre  on  the  occasion.  One  seems  to  hear 
what  George  Meredith  calls  "the  laughter  of  gods  in 
the  background"  as  we  think  of  this  performance.  Fa- 
vart's  beribboned  Marmontelade  goes  through  all  its 
creaky  sentimentality  before  an  audience  half-benevo- 
lent, half -cynical,  and  somewhere  in  balcony,  box,  or 


1789.  ABSENTEEISM.  311 

parterre  sit  that  poor  old  withered  couple,  doddering 
and  dismal,  looking  with  bleared  eyes  at  the  travesty 
of  their  early  youth,  and  thinking  of  their  sad  and 
squalid  life  !  One  thinks  of  that  poor  woman  of  Arthur 
Young's,  with  her  vague  idea  that  "  something  was  to 
be  done  by  some  great  folks  for  some  such  poor  ones, 
but  she  did  not  know  when  nor  how,  but  God  send  us 
better."  Now,  indeed,  it  would  seem  as  if  something 
were  going  to  be  done  ;  the  rumors  of  the  coining 
States-General  were  in  the  ears  of  all  men,  as  Lubin  and 
Annette  blinked  their  rheumy  eyes  at  the  idyllic  stage- 
sham,  all  Chloe  and  Daplmis  and  Pan's  pipes  and  crooks, 
and  thought  of  their  thirteen  children  and  the  grinding 
tithes  and  tolls,  and  wondered  in  a  dazed  kind  of  way 
why  all  the  fine  people  were  making  such  a  fuss  about 
them,  and  whether  the  end  of  the  world  was  at  hand. 
The  end  of  the  world  was  at  hand,  the  end  of  that  world 
which  loved  its  Lubins  and  its  Annettes  on  canvas  and 
on  the  stage,  and  left  them  to  rot  in  misery — the  poor, 
real  wretches  who  shivered  and  sweated  for  the  honor 
and  glory  of  the  Old  Order. 

One  of  the  very  greatest  curses  of  the  Old  Order  was 
the  prevailing  absenteeism.  The  great  landlords,  whether 
nobles  or  princes  of  the  Church,  loved  to  shine  and  be 
shone  upon  in  the  effulgence  of  the  court.  The  obse- 
quious courtier  who  declared  to  the  Sun-King  that  to 
be  away  from  his  sight  was  not  merely  to  be  unhappy, 
but  also  to  be  ridiculous,  set  the  fashion  for  all  succeed- 
ing generations  of  courtiers.  To  the  two  great  orders 
life  was  life  only  within  the  orb  of  the  court.  To  live 
on  one's  own  lands,  to  play  the  great  lord  on  one's  own 
domains,  was  to  attempt  an  intolerable  vegetation.  All 
the  wealthy  peers  and  prelates,  therefore,  thronged  to 
Versailles,  and  squandered  their  vast  revenues  in  keep- 


312  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

ing  up  the  splendor  of  a  splendid  court.  These  courtly 
satellites  represented  the  fine  flower  of  the  noble  and 
clerical  orders.  Although  they  numbered  little  more 
than  a  thousand  each,  they  represented  the  highest 
wealth,  the  proudest  luxury  of  the  aristocracy — were, 
in  a  word,  the  elect  of  the  elect,  and  also  the  most  ab- 
solutely useless  members  of  the  bodies  to  which  they 
belonged.  They  rendered  no  service  to  .the  State  be- 
yond that  of  adding  by  their  presence  and  their  extrava- 
gance to  the  magnificence  of  Versailles.  They  drained 
the  life's  blood  of  their  luckless  peasantry  in  order  to 
ruffle  it  with  more  than  imperial  ostentation  at  the  court 
of  the  king.  It  must  indeed  be  borne  in  mind  that  the 
desire  of  the  greater  nobility  and  the  greater  clergy  to 
dazzle  at  Versailles  was  not  entirely  unprompted.  The 
monarch  liked  to  have  his  great  nobles  about  him  ; 
liked  them  to  spend  their  revenues  in  aggrandizing  his 
own  royal  glory,  in  swelling  the  glittering  ranks  of  his 
attendant  nobility.  If  a  great  lord  or  two,  by  way  of 
change,  took  to  dwelling  for  a  while  with  their  own 
people,  on  their  own  lands,  and  in  their  own  provincial 
chateaux,  they  were  pretty  sure  to  have  it  signified  to 
them  sooner  or  later  that  such  behavior  was  not  pleas- 
ing to  their  royal  master.  Absence  from  court  for  any 
lengthy  period  was  noted  and  promptly  construed  by 
devoted  cabinet  ministers  into  nothing  less  than  a  slight 
to  the  king's  person,  and  very  decisive  hints  would  be 
addressed  to  the  offending  nobles,  with  the  effect  of 
bringing  them  post-haste  back  to  Versailles  again.  Life 
at  Versailles  was  one  endless  court  pageant,  in  which 
the  great  nobles  had  to  play  their  part  by  adding  to 
the  sumptuousness  of  the  entertainment.  The  king 
moved  like  the  central  sun  of  an  illustrious  constella- 
tion. The  disappearance  of  some  star  from  one  of  the 


DEATH  PREFERABLE  TO  EXILE  FROM  COURT.  313 

noted  constellations  would  hardly  have  created  as  much 
surprise  in  the  Bull's  Eye  as  the  disappearance  of  any 
great  noble  from  his  familiar  attendance  upon  majesty. 
Nothing  but  exile  or  death  could  sanction  the  absence 
of  the  high  nobility  from  the  presence  of  their  king. 
Every  now  and  then  some  lord  would  fall  into  disgrace, 
and  be  sent  peremptorily  off  to  mope  on  his  own  es- 
tates, mewed  dismally  in  his  own  castle,  there  to  in- 
trigue and  scheme  and  plot  to  get  back  into  royal  favor 
and  the  ineffable  glories  of  the  Bull's  Eye.  Every  now 
and  then  the  grim  sergeant  Death,  whom  even  court 
ushers  skilful  as  De  Breze  cannot  exclude,  would  ob- 
trude his  presence  upon  the  boscages  and  salons  and 
carry  off  into  an  abiding  exile  the  wearer  of  some  lofty 
name,  some  Richelieu  or  Rohan  or  Gramrnont.  To  the 
true  courtier  even  death  was,  however,  less  terrible  than 
exile.  To  the  satellites  of  the  court  a  country  life  was 
one  of  intolerable  dulness.  Ovid  in  Pontus,  Ovid  among 
the  ruffian  Goths,  could  not  complain  more  piteously  of 
his  hard  lot,  removed  from  Rome  and  the  favor  of  the 
Augustan  face,  than  any  luckless  French  nobleman 
bound  by  his  sovereign's  displeasure  to  abide  for  a  while 
in  some  fair  country  place  that  would  have  seemed  im- 
measurably enchanting  in  the  eyes  of  a  poet  or  a  phi- 
losopher. "  Exile  alone,"  writes  Arthur  Young,  "  forces 
the  French  nobility  to  do  what  the  English  do  by  pref- 
erence ;  to  reside  upon  their  estates,  to  improve  them." 
Elsewhere  he  says  of  the  estates  of  some  great  nobles : 
"  All  the  signs  I  have  seen  of  their  vast  grandeur  are 
heaths,  moors,  deserts,  fern  beds.  Visit  their  castles, 
wherever  they  may  be,  and  you  will  find  them  in  the 
midst  of-  forests  inhabited  by  deer,  wild  boars,  and 
wolves."  What  a  picture  this  affords  us  of  pre-revo- 
lutionary  France  !  A  glittering  handful  of  great  no- 


314  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

bles  daffing  the  time  away  in  Versailles,  and  the  vast 
spaces  of  their  neglected  estates  given  over  to  the  wild 
beast  of  the  woods,  and  to  those  other  less  important 
wild  beasts,  the  men  and  women  who  tilled  and  did  not 
garner,  who  sowed  and  did  not  reap,  that  the  glory  of 
Versailles  might  be  sustained  to  the  full. 

Besides  exile  and  death,  a  third  force  prevailed  to 
keep  certain  of  the  nobility  away  from  the  centre  of 
Versailles.  The  principle  of  primogeniture  had  reduced 
many  of  the  nobles  to  a  very  hard  pass.  We  learn 
from  Chateaubriand  that  in  Brittany  the  eldest  son  in- 
herited two  thirds  of  the  property,  and  the  younger 
sons  divided  among  themselves  the  remaining  third. 
Thus  in  course  of  time  the  younger  sons  of  younger 
sons  came  to  the  division  of  a  pigeon,  a  rabbit,  and  a 
hunting-dog.  They  could  not  work ;  they  were  ashamed 
to  beg  ;  they  drifted  deeper  and  deeper  into  the  most 
ferocious  of  all  poverties,  the  poverty  which  seeks  to 
hold  its  head  high  and  be  brave  in  a  faded  and  fretted 
gentility.  High  and  puissant  lords  of  a  pigeon-house, 
a  toad-hole,  and  a  rabbit-warren,  they  strove  for  a  while 
to  keep  up  appearances,  to  play  their  annual  part  in 
Parisian  society,  until  in  the  fulness  of  time  nothing 
was  left  to  them  but  their  name,  their  abode,  and  their 
feudal  rights.  With  these  feudal  rights  as  their  only 
income  they  naturally  enforced  them  upon  their  un- 
happy peasantry  with  all  the  persistency  of  a  pasha. 
The  majestic  misery  of  Scott's  Ravenswood,  of  Theo- 
phile  Gautier's  Capitaine  Fracasse,  both  ruined  lords 
in  ruined  castles,  was  the  frequent  lot  of  the  French 
nobility  in  the  generation  before  the  Revolution,  but  it 
was  seldom  borne  with  the  heroic  dignity  of  these 
heroes  of  romance.  The  poor  nobility  wore  rusty 
swords  and  hob -nailed  shoes  and  faded  doublets  of 


1789,          HOW   POVERTY   AFFECTED   THE  NOBLES.  315 

antique  cut,  but  they  would  still  hunt  and  play  the 
prince,  and  grind  the  luckless  peasant  under  their  feet. 

We  must,  however,  remember  that  there  was  a  better 
side  to  the  picture.  Some  of  the  nobles  whom  poverty 
compelled  to  reside  upon  their  own  estates  did  in  their 
way,  and  after  their  lights,  behave  not  unkindly  towards 
their  people.  The  French  nobles  at  Versailles  knew  and 
cared  as  little  about  the  peasants  who  labored  and  hun- 
gered for  their  good  pleasure  as  their  descendants  know 
of  the  redskins  of  Canada  or  the  Hindoos  of  Pondi- 
cherry.  But  a  certain  proportion  of  the  nobles  were 
compelled  by  destiny  to  dwell  in  something  like  inter- 
course with  the  peasantry,  and  of  these  a  certain  small 
proportion  allowed  that  intercourse  to  be  tinctured  by 
something  like  humanity.  The  influence  of  Rousseau 
and  of  the  great  masters  of  the  Encyclopaedia  had  ex- 
tended from  the  metropolis  into  the  provinces,  and  the 
comparatively  few  who  were  at  all  seriously  imbued 
with  the  gospel  of  humanity,  as  these  proclaimed  it,  did 
act  with  what  was  for  the  age  great  kindness  to  those 
who  were  dependent  upon  them.  But  these  were  the 
exception,  not  the  rule.  A  selfishness  which  had  be- 
come ingrained  by  long  generations  of  power  to  op- 
press ;  a  malign  egotism  that  ignored  all  need  except  its 
own,  that  refused  to  recognize  any  rights  save  its  own  ; 
a  profligate  passion  for  ostentation  and  display  ;  a  heart- 
less indifference  to  all  things  except  its  own  sublime  ex- 
istence, were  the  prevailing  characteristics  of  the  vast 
majority  of  the  nobility  in  the  time  of  the  Old  Order. 

Of  all  the  nobles'  privileges,  none  was  perhaps  more 
galling  to  the  peasantry  than  the  privilege  of  the  chase. 
Montlosier,  in  his  Memoirs,  relates  that  on  one  occasion 
he  was  travelling  in  the  provinces,  and  every  time  his 
peasant  guides  met  a  herd  of  deer  on  the  route  they  ex- 


3i£  TflE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cu.  XX. 

claimed,  "  There  go  the  nobility  !"  The  story  assumes 
a  graver  significance  from  the  fact  that  Montlosier  was 
an  ardent  royalist  then  and  for  long  after.  There  was 
a  grim  truth  in  the  peasants'  description  of  the  stags  as 
the  nobility  of  France.  The  herds  of  deer,  the  flocks 
of  partridges,  were  infinitely  more  important  in  the  eyes 
of  the  nobility  than  the  lives  and  the  welfare  of  the 
peasantry.  It  was  one  of  the  fantastic  survivals  of  the 
feudal  system  that  only  the  members  of  the  noble  order 
had  the  right  to  hunt.  This  right  they  guarded  with  a 
ferocious  severity.  No  roturier  might  venture  without 
special  permission  to  enclose  his  lands  with  walls,  hedges, 
or  ditches  ;  even  when  the  permission  was  accorded,  it 
was  with  the  condition  that  an  open  space  should  al- 
ways be  left  wide  enough  to  allow  the  noble  huntsmen 
to  pass  through  with  ease.  In  certain  places  the  peas- 
ants were  not  allowed  to  pull  up  the  weeds  that  choked 
the  wheat,  lest  they  should  disturb  the  game.  Rash, 
indeed,  was  the  luckless  farmer  who  went  to  law  to  re- 
cover damages  for  any  injury  that  the  game  might  have 
inflicted  upon  him.  Such  suits  were  never  won.  In- 
deed, men's  lives  were  considered  of  very  little  conse- 
quence in  comparison  with  the  safety  and  the  comfort 
of  the  game.  Poachers  were  killed  at  their  work  by 
gamekeepers  and  no  heed  taken.  If  a  gamekeeper  killed 
a  peasant  it  was  enough  to  say  that  it  had  been  done  in 
defence  of  his  master's  game  to  convert  a  murder  into 
an  exemplary  act  of  service.  Woe  be  to  the  luckless 
knave  who  disturbed  a  sitting  partridge,  who  interfered 
with  the  rabbit  that  gnawed  his  corn,  with  the  stag  that 
browsed  upon  his  fruit-trees.  Had  he  lived  in  ancient 
Egypt;*  and  lifted  his  hand  against  some  animal  sacred 
to  the  gods,  some  cat  of  Bubastis,  some  cow  of  Isis, 
Borne  jackal  of  Anubis,  he  would  scarcely  have  been 


1789.  FARMERS-GEXERAL.  317 

worse  off.  The  Egyptian  of  old  who  slew  a -sacred 
beast  would  have  committed  blasphemy  against  the 
gods  of  the  strange  Egyptian  heaven  ;  the  peasant  in 
France  under  the  Old  Order  would  have  committed  an 
offence  against  the  deities  of  the  Bull's  Eye  ;  in  either 
case  he  was  like  to  pay  with  the  last  stake  of  life  for  his 
mortal  sin.  Small  wonder  if  the  peasant  hardly  knew 
which  he  hated  most,  the  great  lord  in  Versailles  or  the 
wild  beasts  and  birds  of  the  woods,  whose  well-being 
was  so  much  nearer  to  the  heart  of  the  great  lord  than 
the  life  of  the  peasant,  or  the  peasant's  wife,  or  the  peas- 
ant's child.  All  over  France  vast  tracts  of  land  lay 
bare  and  desolate,  ravaged  by  the  game  for  whom  they 
were  reserved.  But  it  never  occurred  to  the  average 
French  nobleman  that  such  a  condition  of  things  was 
not  in  itself  excellent,  that  hunting  was  not  the  noblest 
mission  of  privileged  mankind,  or  that  a  time  would  ever 
come  when  the  unprivileged  would  like  to  take  their 
turn,  and  hunt  a  well-kept,  carefully  guarded  quarry. 

Perhaps,  however,  the  body  of  men  who  were  better 
hated  than  any  body  of  men  before  or  since  in  France 
were  the  farmers-general.  They  formed  perhaps  the 
worst  of  the  many  evil  institutions  which  belonged  to 
the  vast  centralized  system  of  the  Old  Order.  It  had 
long  been  the  iniquitous  custom  in  France  to  lease  out 
the  aides  or  indirect  taxes  to  persons  who  were  willing 
to  pay  largely  for  the  privilege  in  the  hope  of  reaping 
still  more  largely.  As  it  was  their  interest  to  wring 
every  farthing  they  could  from  those  on  whom  the  taxa- 
tion was  levied,  so  it  was  inevitable  that  they  should  be 
cordially  and  indeed  deservedly  hated.  Sully  tried  in 
vain,  Colbert  tried  in  vain,  to  limit  their  rapacity.  In 
1720  the  farmers  of  the  taxes  formed  a  syndicate  called 
the  Ferme  Generate,  which  soon  became  one  of  the 


318  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XX. 

wealthiest  arid  one  of  the  most  dangerous  institutions 
of  the  state.  There  were,  as  we  know,  virtuous  men 
among  the  farmers-general.  But  the  direct  effect  of 
such  an  execrable  institution  was  not  to  promote  virtue 
among  those  who  levied  the  taxes  or  those  upon  whom 
the  taxes  were  levied.  There  is  a  story  told  often 
enough,  but  which  bears  re-telling,  which  illustrates  the 
odor  of  the  farmers-general.  Voltaire  was  once  in  a 
company  where  tales  of  robbers  were  the  theme.  Every 
one  present  contributed  to  the  amusement  of  his  fellows 
by  some  appalling  narrative  of  brigandage,  outlawry, 
and  crime.  At  last  it  came  to  Voltaire's  turn,  and  the 
poet  was  called  upon  to  tell  some  robber  tale.  "  Gen- 
tlemen," said  Voltaire,  "there  was  once  a  farmer-gen- 
eral." Then  he  was  silent.  His  audience  begged  him 
to  go  on.  Voltaire  declined  ;  that  was  the  whole  of  his 
story.  To  be  a  farmer-general  was  to  be  a  champion 
robber  of  whom  nothing  further  need  be  narrated. 


1789.  WHAT   ARTHUR  YOUNG   SAW.  319 


CHAPTER  XXI. 

WHAT   AKTHUB   YOUNG   SAID. 

SUCH,  in  rapid  lines,  was  the  condition  of  France 
when  Arthur  Young  travelled  in  it  during  the  years 
which  directly  preceded  the  Revolution.  He  saw  a 
country  where  the  remains  of  the  feudal  system  were 
still  heavy  upon  the  soil,  where  the  monarchy  had  grad- 
ually absorbed  the  old  warlike  powers  of  the  nobles, 
where  the  gabelle  of  Philip  the  Fair,  the  taille  of 
Charles  VII.,  the  aides  of  the  States-General  of  1356 
were  bleeding  the  land  to  death.  He  saw  a  country 
where  the  provinces  were  administered  by  intendants 
acting  on  the  royal  commission,  a  country  governed 
from  Paris  and  Versailles.  He  saw  a  country  where 
the  two  great  orders  and  the  rest  of  the  people  were 
marked  off  with  the  rigidity  of  Hindoo  caste,  where  the 
existence  of  the  most  grotesque  privileges  mocked  the 
advance  of  civilization  and  of  thought,  where  the  court 
was  crowded  with  a  profligate  nobility,  while  their  do- 
mains ran  to  ruin,  where  power  and  dignity  was  the 
privilege  of  the  few,  and  oppression  and  misery  the  lot 
of  the  many — a  country,  in  a  word,  which  was  one  mad 
masquerade  of  misgovernment.  Fortunately  for  us, 
fortunately  for  the  world,  Arthur  Young  has  left  upon 
record  a  brief  sketch  of  the  condition  of  France,  so  im- 
portant that  we  need  no  justification  for  reproducing 
the  substance  of  it  here.  The  immense  value  of  such  a 
contemporary  study  makes  the  use  of  it  imperative. 


320  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXI. 

It  is  not  surprising  to  find  the  liberal-minded  Eng- 
lishman especially  shocked  by  the  gross  infamy  which 
attended  lettres  de  cachet  and  the  Bastille  during  the 
whole  reign  of  Louis  XV.,  an  infamy  which  made  them 
esteemed  in  England,  by  people  not  well  informed,  as 
the  most  prominent  features  of  the  despotism  of  France. 
They  were,  certainly,  carried  to  an  excess  hardly  cred- 
ible; to  the  length  of  being  sold,  with  blanks,  to  be  filled 
up  with  names  at  the  pleasure  of  the  purchaser,  who  was 
thus  able,  in  the  gratification  of  private  revenge,  to  tear 
a  man  from  the  bosom  of  his  family  and  bury  him  in  a 
dungeon,  where  he  would  exist  forgotten  and  die  un- 
known. But  Arthur  Young  was  clear-minded  enough 
to  see  that  such  excesses  could  not  be  common  in  any 
country,  and  that  they  were  reduced  almost  to  nothing 
after  the  accession  of  Louis  XVI.  The  great  mass  of 
the  people,  those  of  the  lower  and  middle  ranks,  could 
suffer  very  little  from  such  engines,  and  as  few  of  them 
were  objects  of  jealousy,  had  there  been  nothing  else  to 
complain  of,  it  is  not  probable  they  would  ever  have 
been  driven  to  take  arms.  The  abuses  attending  the 
levy  of  taxes  were  heavy  and  universal.  The  kingdom 
was  parcelled  into  generalities,  with  an  intendant  at  the 
head  of  each,  into  whose  hands  the  whole  power  of  the 
crown  was  delegated  for  everything  except  the  military 
authority  ;  but  particularly  for  all  affairs  of  finance. 
The  generalities  were  subdivided  into  elections,  at  the 
head  of  which  was  a  sub-delegue,  appointed  by  the  in- 
tendant. The  rolls  of  the  tattle,  capitation,  viugti&mes, 
and  other  taxes  were  distributed  among  districts,  par- 
ishes, individuals,  at  the  pleasure  of  the  intendant,  who 
could  exempt,  change,  add,  or  diminish  at  pleasure. 
Such  an  enormous  power,  constantly  acting,  and  from 
which  no  man  was  free,  might,  in  the  nature  of  things, 


1789.  INJUSTICE   WITH  EXAMPLE.  321 

degenerate  in  many  cases  into  absolute  tyranny.  It 
must  be  obvious  that  the  friends,  acquaintances,  and 
dependants  of  the  intendant  and  of  all  his  sub-delegues, 
and  the  friends  of  these  friends  to  a  long  chain  of  de- 
pendence, might  be  favored  in  taxation  at  the  expense 
of  their  miserable  neighbors  ;  and  that  noblemen,  in  fa- 
vor at  court,  to  whose  protection  the  intendant  himself 
would  naturally  look  up,  could  find  little  difficulty  in 
throwing  much  of  the  weight  of  their  taxes  on  others 
without  a  similar  support.  Instances,  and  even  gross 
ones,  came  under  Arthur  Young's  notice  in  many  parts 
of  the  kingdom  that  made  him  shudder  at  the  oppres- 
sion to  which  numbers  must  have  been  condemned,  by 
the  undue  favors  granted  to  such  crooked  influence. 
But,  without  recurring  to  such  cases,  what,  he  asked 
himself,  must  have  been  the  state  of  the  poor  people 
paying  heavy  taxes,  from  which  the  nobility  and  clergy 
were  exempted  ?  It  must  have  been  a  cruel  aggravation 
of  their  misery  to  see  those  who  could  best  afford  to  pay 
exempted  just  because  they  were  able  to  pay  !  The  en- 
rolments for  the  militia,  which  the  cahiers  called  an  in- 
justice without  example,  were  another  dreadful  scourge 
on  the  peasantry;  and,  as  married  men  were  exempted 
from  it,  occasioned  in  some  degree  that  mischievous 
population  which  brought  beings  into  the  world  for  lit- 
tle else  than  to  be  starved.  'The  corvees,  or  police  of 
the  roads,  were  annually  the  ruin  of  many  hundreds  of 
farmers.  More  than  three  hundred  were  reduced  to 
beggary  in  filling  up  one  vale  in  Lorraine.  All  these 
oppressions  fell  on  the  Tiers  Etat  only,  the  nobility 
and  clergy  having  been  equally  exempted  from  tallies, 
militia,  and  corvees.  The  penal  code  of  finance  made 
the  generous  gentleman-farmer  shudder  at  the  horrors 
of  punishment  inadequate  to  the  crime.  Arthur  Young 
I.— 21 


322  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXI. 

quotes  elaborate  contemporary  calculations  which  serve 
to  show  that,  upon  an  average,  there  were  annually 
taken  up  and  sent  to  prison  or  the  galleys  two  thousand 
three  hundred  and  forty  men,  eight  hundred  and  ninety- 
six  women,  two  hundred  and  one  children,  making  a 
total  of  three  thousand  four  hundred  and  thirty-seven 
persons.  Of  these,  three  hundred  were  sent  to  the  gal- 
leys. The  salt  confiscated  from  these  miserable  people 
came  to  an  enormous  amount,  and  represented  an  enor- 
mous waste  of  money. 

A  few  features,  said  Arthur  Young,  will  sufficiently 
characterize  the  old  government  of  France.  Then  he 
proceeded  to  draw  up  the  most  scathing  indictment  ever 
levelled  at  the  Old  Order.  The  gross  cruelties  in  con- 
nection with  the  yabelle  especially  impressed  him,  as 
well  indeed  they  might.  Smugglers  of  salt,  armed  and 
assembled  to  the  number  of  five,  were  punished  in  Pro- 
vence with  a  fine  of  five  hundred  livres  and  nine  years' 
galleys  ;  in  all  the  rest  of  the  kingdom  the  punishment 
was  death.  Smugglers  armed  and  assembled,  but  in 
number  under  five,  underwent  for  the  first  offence  a  fine 
of  three  hundred  livres  and  three  years'  galleys.  The 
second  offence  was  punished  by  death.  Smugglers  with- 
out arms,  but  with  horses,  carts,  or  boats,  were  fined  three 
hundred  livres  or  got  three  years'  galleys.  The  second 
offence  was  rated  at  four  hundred  livres  and  nine  years' 
galleys.  In  Dauphine,  the  second  offence  earned  the 
galleys  for  life,  but  in  milder  Provence  only  five  years' 
galleys.  Smugglers  who  carried  the  salt  on  their  backs, 
and  were  without  arms,  were  fined  two  hundred  livres. 
If  this  was  not  paid  they  were  flogged  and  branded. 
The  second  offence  meant  a  fine  of  three  hundred  livres 
and  six  years'  galleys.  Women,  married  and  single,  who 
smuggled  salt  paid  for  the  first  offence  a  fine  of  one 


1789.         THE   GABELLE  AND   THE   CAPITAINERIES.          323 

hundred  livres  ;  for  the  second,  three  hundred  livres  ; 
for  the  third,  they  were  flogged  and  banished  the  king- 
dom for  life.  Their  husbands  were  responsible  for  them 
both  in  fine  and  body.  Children  smugglers  were  pun- 
ishable the  same  as  women.  Fathers  and  mothers  were 
made  responsible  ;  and  for  defect  of  payment  flogged. 
Nobles  who  smuggled  were  deprived  of  their  nobility  ; 
and  their  houses  were  razed  to  the  ground.  Any  per- 
sons in  the  employment  of  the  revenue  who  smuggled, 
and  all  who  assisted  in  the  theft  of  salt  in  the  transport, 
were  punished  by  death.  Soldiers  smuggling,  with  arms, 
were  hanged  ;  without  arms,  they  got  the  galleys  for 
life.  Buying  smuggled  salt  to  resell  it  met  the  same 
punishments  as  for  smuggling.  Persons  in  the  salt  em- 
ployments were  empowered,  if  two,  or  one  with  two  wit- 
nesses, to  enter  and  examine  the  houses  even  of  the  priv- 
ileged orders.  All  families  and  persons  liable  to  the 
gabelle  had,  as  we  have  already  seen,  their  consumption 
of  salt,  exclusive  of  salt  for  salting  meat  and  the  like, 
estimated  at  7  pounds  a  head  per  annum,  which  quantity 
they  were  forced  to  buy,  whether  they  wanted  it  or  not, 
under  pain  of  various  fines  according  to  the  case. 

But  if  Arthur  Young's  blood  boiled  at  the  iniquity  of 
the  gabelle,  other  iniquities  kept  it  warm.  The  capi- 
taineries  were  a  dreadful  scourge  on  all  the  occupiers 
of  land.  By  this  term  is  to  be  understood  the  para- 
mountship  of  certain  districts  granted  by  the  king  to 
princes  of  the  blood,  by  which  they  were  put  in  pos- 
session of  the  property  of  all  game,  even  on  lands  not 
belonging  to  them,  and,  what  seemed  still  more  singu- 
lar to  the  traveller,  on  manors  granted  long  before  to 
individuals  ;  so  that  the  erecting  of  a  district  into  a 
capitainerie  was  an  annihilation  of  all  manorial  rights 
to  game  within  it.  This  was  a  trifling  business  in  com- 


324  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXI. 

parison  with  other  circumstances  ;  for,  in  speaking  of 
the  preservation  of  the  game  in  these  capitaineries,  it 
must  be  observed  that  by  game  must  be  understood 
whole  droves  of  wild  boars,  and  herds  of  deer  not  con- 
fined by  any  wall  or  pale,  but  wandering  at  pleasure 
over  the  whole  country  to  the  destruction  of  crops  ; 
and  to  the  peopling  of  the  galleys  by  the  wretched 
peasants  who  presumed  to  kill  them  in  order  to  save 
that  food  which  was  to  support  their  helpless  children. 
The  game  in  the  capitainerie  of  Montceau,  in  four  par- 
ishes only,  did  mischief  to  the  amount  of  one  hundred 
and  eighty-four  thousand  two  hundred  and  sixty-three 
livres  per  annum.  No  wonder,  then,  if  time  should  find 
the  people  asking  for  the  destruction  of  these  terrible 
game-laws,  and  demanding  as  a  favor  the  permission  to 
sow  their  fields  and  reap  their  meadows  without  regard 
for  pheasants  or  other  game.  Truly,  the  English  trav- 
eller could  scarcely  understand,  without  being  told,  that 
there  were  numerous  edicts  for  preserving  the  game, 
which  prohibited  weeding  and  hoeing  lest  the  young 
partridges  should  be  disturbed  ;  which  prohibited  steep- 
ing seed  lest  it  should  injure  the  game  ;  which  prohib- 
ited manuring  with  night-soil  lest  the  flavor  of  the  par- 
tridges should  be  injured  by  feeding  on  the  corn  so  pro- 
duced ;  which  prohibited  mowing  hay  before  a  certain 
time,  so  late  as  to  spoil  many  crops,  and  taking  away 
the  stubble,  which  would  deprive  the  birds  of  shelter. 
The  tyranny  exercised  in  these  capitaineries,  which  ex- 
tended over  four  hundred  leagues  of  country,  was  so 
great  that  many  cahiers  demanded  the  utter  suppression 
of  them.  Such  were  the  exertions  of  arbitrary  power 
which  the  lower  orders  felt  directly  from  the  royal  au- 
thority ;  but,  heavy  as  they  were,  it  was  to  Arthur  Young's 
mind  a  question  whether  the  others,  suffered  circuit- 


1789.  HOW   FEUDALISM   WORKED.  325 

ously  through  the  nobility  and  the  clergy,  were  not  yet 
more  oppressive.  Nothing  can  exceed  the  complaints 
made  in  the  cahiers  under  this  head.  They  speak  of  the 
dispensation  of  justice  in  the  manorial  courts  as  com- 
prising every  species  of  despotism :  the  indeterminate 
districts,  the  endless  appeals,  irreconcilable  with  lib- 
erty and  prosperity,  and  irrevocably  proscribed  in  the 
opinion  of  the  public  ;  the  incessant  litigation,  favor- 
ing every  species  of  chicane,  and  ruining  the  parties 
concerned,  not  only  by  enormous  expenses  on  the  most 
petty  objects,  but  by  a  dreadful  loss  of  time.  The 
judges  were  commonly  ignorant  pretenders,  who  held 
their  courts. in  wine-shops,  and  were  absolutely  depend- 
ent on  the  seigneurs  In  consequence  of  their  feudal 
powers.  These  were  vexations  which  were  the  great- 
est scourge  of  the  people,  and  which  made  them  de- 
mand that  feudalism  should  disappear.  The  country- 
man was  tyrannically  enslaved  by  it.  There  were  fixed 
and  heavy  rents  ;  vexatious  processes  to  secure  them  ; 
unjust  appreciations,  unjust  augmentations.  There  were 
fines  at  every  change  of  the  property,  in  the  direct  as 
well  as  collateral  line  ;  feudal  redemption  ;  fines  on 
sale,  to  the  eighth  and  even  the  sixth  penny  ;  redemp- 
tions injurious  in  their  origin,  and  still  more  so  in  their 
extension.  There  was  the  banalite  of  the  mill,  of  the 
oven,  and  of  the  wine  and  cider  press  —  a  horrible 
law,  by  which  the  people  were  bound  to  grind  their 
corn  at  the  mill  of  the  seigneur  only ;  to  press  their 
grapes  at  his  press  only,  and  to  bake  their  bread  in  his 
oven,  by  which  means  the  bread  was  often  spoiled,  and 
more  especially  the  wine,  since  in  Champagne  those 
grapes  which,  when  pressed  immediately,  would  make 
white  wine,  would,  by  waiting  for  the  press,  which 
often  happened,  make  red  wine  only.  There  were  cor- 


326  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXI. 

vees  by  custom  ;  corvees  by  usage  of  the  fief  ;  corvees 
established  by  unjust  decrees  ;  corvees  arbitrary,  and 
other  fantastical  servitudes.  There  were  prestations, 
extravagant  and  burdensome  ;  collections  by  assess- 
ments incollectible  ;  litigations  ruinous  and  without 
end  ;  the  rod  of  seigneural  finance  was  forever  shaken 
over  the  people's  heads.  Under  such  vexation,  ruin, 
outrage,  violence,  and  destructive  servitude  the  peas- 
ants, almost  on  a  level  with  Polish  slaves,  could  never 
but  be  miserable,  vile,  and  oppressed.  Well  might 
they  demand  that  the  use  of  hand-mills  should  be 
free  ;  and  hope  that  posterity,  if  possible,  might  be 
ignorant  that  feudal  tyranny  in  Bretagne,.  armed  with 
the  judicial  power,  did  not  blush  in  those  evil  times  to 
break  hand-mills,  and  to  sell  annually  to  the  miserable 
the  faculty  of  bruising  between  two  stones  a  measure 
of  buckwheat  or  barley.  The  very  terms  of  such  com- 
plaints were,  as  Arthur  Young  was  glad  to  think,  un- 
known in  England,  and  consequently  untranslatable ; 
they  had  probably  arisen  long  since  the  feudal  system 
ceased  in  the  kingdom.  What,  asked  Arthur  Young,  in 
manly  British  bewilderment,  were  those  tortures  of  the 
peasantry  in  Bretagne  which  they  called  chevauchesf 
quintaines  f  soule  f  saut  de  poison  f  baiser  de  mariees  f 
chansons?  transporte  cTceuf  sur  une  charette?  silence  des 
grenouillesf  This  last  was  a  curious  article.  When 
the  lady  of  the  seigneur  lay  in,  the  people  were  obliged 
to  beat  the  waters  in  marshy  districts  to  keep  the  frogs 
silent,  that  she  might  not  be  disturbed.  This  duty,  a 
very  oppressive  one,  was  commuted  into  a  pecuniary 
fine.  What,  he  asked  despairingly,  were  corvee  d  mi- 
sericorde  f  milods  ?  leide  ?  couponage  f  cartelage  f  ba- 
rage  f  fouage  f  marechaussee  ?  banvin  f  ban  d'aortt  f 
trousses  f  gelinage  ?  civeragc  f  taillabilite  ?  vingtain  ? 


1789.  TITHES  IN  ENGLAND  AND  FRANCE.  327 

sterlage  ?  bordelage  f  minage  f  ban  de  vendanges  ?  droit 
d'accepte  ?  In  passing  through  many  of  the  French  prov- 
inces, Arthur  Young  was  struck  with  the  various  and 
heavy  complaints  of  the  farmers  and  little  proprietors  of 
the  feudal  grievances,  with  the  weight  of  which  their  in- 
dustry was  burdened ;  but  he  could  not  at  first  con- 
ceive the  multiplicity  of  the  shackles  which  kept  them 
poor  and  depressed.  He  came  to  understand  it  better 
afterwards,  from  the  conversation  and  complaints  of 
some  grand  seigneurs,  as  the  revolution  advanced;  and 
he  then  learned  that  the  principal  rental  of  many  estates 
consisted  in  services  and  feudal  tenures,  by  the  baneful 
influence  of  which  the  industry  of  the  people  was  al- 
most exterminated.  In  regard  to  the  oppressions  of  the 
clergy,  as  to  tithes,  Arthur  Young's  honesty  compelled 
him  to  do  that  body  a  justice  to  which  a  claim  could 
not  be  then  laid  in  England.  Though  the  ecclesiastical 
tenth  was  levied  in  France  more  severely  than  usual  in 
Italy,  yet  was  it  never  exacted  with  such  horrid  greedi- 
ness as  was  then  the  disgrace  of  England.  When  taken 
in  kind,  no  such  thing  was  known  in  any  part  of  France, 
where  he  made  inquiries,  as  a  tenth;  it  was  always  a 
twelfth,  or  a  thirteenth,  or  even  a  twentieth  of  the  prod- 
uce. And  in  no  part  of  the  kingdom  did  a  new  article 
of  culture  pay  anything;  thus  turnips,  cabbages,  clover, 
chicory,  potatoes,  and  the  like,  paid  nothing.  In  many 
parts,  meadows  were  exempted.  Silkworms  paid  noth- 
ing. Olives  in  some  places  paid  —  in  others  they  did 
not.  Cows  paid  nothing.  Lambs  paid  nothing  from 
the  twelfth  to  the  twenty-first.  Wool  paid  nothing. 
Such  mildness  in  the  levy  of  this  odious  tax  was  abso- 
lutely unknown  in  England.  But  mild  as  it  was,  the 
burden  to  people  groaning  under  so  many  other  oppres- 
sions united  to  render  their  situation  so  bad  that  no 


328  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXI. 

change  could  be  for  the  worse.  But  these  were  not  all 
the  evils  with  which  the  people  struggled.  The  admin- 
istration of  justice  was  partial,  venal,  infamous.  Arthur 
Young,  in  conversation  with  many  very  sensible  men, 
in  different  parts  of  the  kingdom,  met  with  something 
of  content  with  their  government,  in  all  other  respects 
than  this;  but  upon  the  question  of  expecting  justice  to 
be  really  and  fairly  administered,  every  one  confessed 
there  was  no  such  thing  to  be  looked  for.  The  conduct 
of  the  parliaments  was  profligate  and  atrocious.  Upon 
almost  every  cause  that  came  before  them  interest  was 
openly  made  with  the  judges;  and  woe  betided  the  man 
who,  with  a  cause  to  support,  had  no  means  of  concilia- 
ting favor,  either  by  the  beauty  of  a  handsome  wife  or 
by  other  methods.  It  had  been  said,  by  many  writers, 
that  property  was  as  secure  under  the  old  government 
of  France  as  it  was  in  England.  This  assertion  might, 
Arthur  Young  admitted,  possibly  be  true,  as  far  as  any 
violence  from  the  king,  his  ministers,  or  the  great  was 
concerned  ;  but  for  all  that  mass  of  property,  which 
comes  in  every  country  to  be  dealt  with  in  courts  of 
justice,  there  was  not  even  the  shadow  of  security,  un- 
less the  parties  were  totally  and  equally  unknown,  and 
totally  and  equally  honest.  In  every  other  case,  he  who 
had  the  best  interest  with  the  judges  was  sure  to  be  the 
winner.  To  reflecting  minds,  the  cruelty  and  abomi- 
nable practices  attending  such  courts  were  sufficiently 
apparent.  There  was  also  a  circumstance  in  the  con- 
stitution of  these  parliaments  but  little  known  in  Eng- 
land, and  which,  under  such  a  government  as  that  of 
France,  might  well  be  considered  as  very  singular  by 
Arthur  Young.  They  had  the  power  and  were  in  the 
constant  practice  of  issuing  decrees,  without  the  consent 
of  the  crown,  and  which  had  the  force  of  laws  through 


1789.  LAWS  OF  KING  AND  OF  PARLIAMENT.  329 

the  whole  of  their  jurisdiction.  Of  all  the  laws,  these 
were  sure  to  be  the  best  obeyed;  for  as,  by  a  horrible 
system  of  tyranny,  all  infringements  of  them  were 
brought  before  sovereign  courts,  composed  of  the  same 
persons  who  had  enacted  these  laws,  they  were  certain 
of  being  punished  with  the  last  severity.  It  might  well 
appear  strange,  in  a  government  so  despotic  in  some  re- 
spects as  that  of  France,  to  see  the  parliaments  in  every 
part  of  the  kingdom  making  laws  without  the  king's 
consent,  and  even  in  defiance  of  his  authority.  The 
English  whom  Arthur  Young  met  in  France  were  sur- 
prised to  see  some  of  these  bodies  issuing  orders  against 
the  export  of  corn  out  of  the  provinces  subject  to  their 
jurisdiction,  into  the  neighboring  provinces,  at  the  very 
time  when  the  king,  through  the  organ  of  so  popular  a 
minister  as  Necker,  and  even  at  the  requisition  of  the 
National  Assembly  itself,  was  decreeing  an  absolutely 
free  transport  of  corn  throughout  the  kingdom.  But 
this  was  nothing  new ;  it  was  their  common  practice. 
The  Parliament  of  Rouen  passed  an  order  against  kill- 
ing of  calves ;  it  was  a  preposterous  one,  and  opposed 
by  the  administration ;  but  it  had  its  full  force ;  and 
had  a  butcher  dared  to  offend  against  it  he  would  have 
found,  by  the  rigor  of  his  punishment,  who  was  his 
master.  Inoculation  was  favored  by  the  court  in  Louis 
XV. 's  time;  but  the  Parliament  of  Paris  passed  an  order 
against  it,  much  more  effective  in  prohibiting  than  the 
favor  of  the  court  in  encouraging  the  practice.  Such 
instances  were  innumerable,  and  they  forced  Arthur 
Young  to  remark  that  the  bigotry,  ignorance,  false 
principles,  and  tyranny  of  these  bodies  were  generally 
conspicuous ;  and  that  the  court,  except  on  a  question 
of  taxation,  never  had  a  dispute  with  a  parliament  but 
the  parliament  was  sure  to  be  wrong.  Their  constitu- 


330  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXI. 

tion,  in  respect  to  the  administration  of  justice,  was  so 
truly  rotten  that  the  members  sat  as  judges  even  in 
causes  of  private  property  in  which  they  were  them- 
selves the  parties,  and  had,  in  this  capacity,  been  guilty 
of  oppressions  and  cruelties  which  the  crown  had  rarely 
dared  to  attempt. 

Such  is  the  picture  in  little  of  the  intolerable  con- 
dition of  things  which  rendered  revolution  inevitable. 
Such  is  the  picture  in  little  which  presented  itself  to 
the  keen  eyes  of  that  wandering  Englishman,  whose 
statements  of  what  he  saw  and  what  he  heard  are  so 
inestimably  precious  to  us.  We  seem  as  we  read  his 
words  as  if  we  had  sat  by  his  side  in  some  stately  Lon- 
don drawing-room,  or  in  the  wide  hall  of  some  Sussex 
country-house,  and  listened  to  his  cleai  descriptions  of 
the  troubled  France  that  he  knew  so  well,  and  to  his 
shrewd  judgments  upon  the  hideously  unnatural  system 
under  which  it  had  so  long  groaned.  A  contemporary 
of  that  system,  he  was  able  to  look  at  it  from  the  out- 
side almost  as  much  as  if  he  were  an  Englishman  of  to- 
day; he  was  able  to  weigh  it  and  to  judge  it  with  a 
mind  as  clear  and  as  impartial  as  that  of  any  of  his 
fellow-countrymen  in  the  brilliant  epoch  to  which  he 
belonged  and  which  he  helped  to  adorn.  We  shall 
later  on  find  ourselves  face  to  face  with  an  existing  and 
active  National  Assembly,  ready  to  deal  very  summarily 
with  all  the  peculiar  privileges  and  abuses  which  belong 
to  what  is  known  as  the  Old  Order.  When  Arthur  Young 
was  riding  his  horse  along  those  French  high-roads  and 
making  the  reflections  which  afterwards  bore  fruit  in 
the  remarkable  judgment  he  gave  to  the  world,  he  little 
thought  that  a  day  was  close  at  hand  when  all  the  in-- 
justices  of  which  he  complains  would  be  formally  abol- 
ished by  a  constitutional  body.  But  the  day  of  the 


1789.  THE  GREAT  RENtJtfCtATIOtf.  331 

Great  Renunciation  was  close  at  hand,  the  day  that  was 
to  witness  the  solemn  denial,  the  solemn  destruction  of 
that  grotesque,  fantastic,  intricate,  and  altogether  hor- 
rible institution,  the  Old  Order. 


332  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 


CHAPTER   XXII. 

PARIS. 

IN  the  month  of  October  of  the  year  1783  the  hero 
of  a  certain  famous  or  infamous  fiction  entered  Paris 
for  the  first  time  by  the  Faubourg  Saint-Marceau.  "  I 
sought,"  he  says,  "  that  stately  city  of  which  I  had  read 
such  wonderful  accounts.  I  found  but  high  and  squalid 
tenements,  long  and  ludicrously  narrow  streets,  poor 
wretches  everywhere  clothed  with  rags,  a  crowd  of 
wellnigh  naked  children  ;  I  beheld  a  dense  population, 
and  appalling  poverty.  I  asked  my  father  if  that  was 
indeed  Paris  ;  he  answered,  coldly,  that  it  was  certainly 
not  the  finest  quarter  ;  on  the  morrow  we  should  have 
time  to  see  another."  These  sentences,  almost  the  open- 
ing sentences  of  the  once  renowned  romance  of  "  Fau- 
blas,"  make  a  strangely  appropriate  text  for  any  study 
of  or  any  speculation  upon  the  French  Revolution.  As 
we  think  of  those  two  riders  entering  Paris  in  the  gath- 
ering gloom  of  the  dying  day,  the  haughty,  sombre 
man  to  whom  Paris  and  all  its  ways  were  long  familiar, 
and  the  eager  excited  youth  who  enters  for  the  first 
time  the  enchanted  palace,  and  finds  it  dust  and  ashes, 
we  are  half  inclined  to  forgive  Louvet  all  the  follies  of 
his  life  for  that  single  picture  which  seems  to  bring 
pre-revolutionary  Paris  nearer  to  us  than  any  other 
picture  in  pen  or  pencil  known  to  us. 

Neither  Faublas  the  fictitious,  nor  Louvet  his  maker, 
would  seem  to  have  learned  any  lesson  from  the  rags, 


1789.  PRE-REVOLUTiONARY   PARIS.  333 

the  hunger,  and  the  agony  which  the  one  saw  and  the 
other  recorded.  And  yet  when  the  book  in  which  those 
words  appear  was  first  printed  the  Old  World  was 
drifting  with  awful  swiftness  to  its  destruction.  •  No 
one  can  read  such  a  story  as  "  Faublas  "  without  seeing 
that  in  such  corruption  the  germs  of  Revolution  must 
be  inevitably  hidden;  no  one  can  read  "  Faublas  "with- 
out feeling  that  the  society  and  the  civilization  which 
it  not  unfaithfully,  and  most  certainly  not  satirically, 
described,  called  for  some  cataclysm  to  sweep  it  out  of 
existence.  Listen  to  Louvet  once  again,  speaking  this 
time  in  his  own  proper  person  in  the  preface  to  a  con- 
cluding portion  of  his  romance,  published,  of  all  odd 
times  in  the  century,  in  the  month  of  July,  1789.  He 
is  boasting  of  his  book  and  of  its  hero.  "  I  have  striven," 
he  says, "  that  Faublas,  frivolous  and  gallant  as  the  na- 
tion for  which  and  by  which  he  was  made,  should  have, 
as  it  were,  a  French  physiognomy.  I  have  striven  that 
in  the  midst  of  his  defects  the  world  should  recognize 
in  him  the  tone,  the  language,  and  the  manners  of  the 
young  men  of  my  country.  Tt  is  in  France,  and  it  is 
only  in  France,  I  believe,  that  we  must  seek  the  other 
types  of  whom  I  have  too  easily  designed  the  copies — 
husbands  at  the  same  time  so  libertine,  so  jealous,  so 
facile,  and  so  foolish,  beauties  so  seductive,  so  deceived, 
and  so  deceitful."  With  the  crash  of  the  greatest  fall 
in  Christendom  ringing  in  the  ears  of  Europe,  Louvet 
de  Couvray  makes  his  bow  to  -mankind,  and  begs  them 
to  accept  that  estimate  of  his  countrymen  and  country- 
women. Revolution  was  sorely  needed  when  the  no- 
bility of  France  could  find  such  a  panegyrist. 

Yet  there  are  worse  books  than  "  Faublas,"  and  worse 
writers  than  Citizen  Louvet,  ci-devant  Louvet  de  Cou- 
vray. Mr.  Carlyle  speaks  wild  and  whirling  words 


334  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

about  the  book ;  calls  it,  happily  enough,  a  "  wretched 
cloaca  of  a  book,"  but  asks,  unhappily  enough,  "  what 
picture  of  French  society  is  here  ?"  and  answers  yet 
more  unhappily  his  own  question,  "picture  properly  of 
nothing."  The  picture  is,  unfortunately,  true  enough. 
It  is  not  an  exhaustive  picture.  All  the  France  of  1789 
is  not  encompassed  in  its  pages,  but  what  it  does  pre- 
sent is  sufficiently  veracious.  Autobiographical,  fictitious 
Faublas  is  a  gentleman  and  a  moralist  compared  with 
autobiographical,  real  Casanova.  A  society  which  could 
tolerate  and  even  idolize  a  Richelieu  and  a  De  Fronsac, 
damnable  father  and  yet  more  damnable  son,  can  hard- 
ly complain  of  being  travestied  in  the  pages  of  poor, 
sensual,  not  all  unmanly  or  all  uncourageous  Louvet. 
Madame  Roland,  the  high-minded,  the  beautiful  Giron- 
dist, can  speak,  and  speak  seriously,  of  Louvet's  "  pretty 
stories."  Not  all  the  praise  of  all  the  Girondists  who 
ever  perished  on  the  guillotine  could  make  us  of  to-day 
think  the  adventures  of  Faublas  a  "  pretty  story."  But 
Madame  Roland's  words  could  make  us  and  do  make 
us  see  very  distinctly  that  the  book  which  an  ardent 
revolutionary  and  patriot  can  describe  in  such  nursery 
terms  can  hardly  be  a  very  highly  colored  picture  of  the 
society  it  delineates. 

It  is  one  of  the  blessings  of  the  historian  that  fortune 
is  pleased  every  now  and  then  to  inspire  individuals 
here  and  there  with  the  ardent  desire  to  describe  for 
the  benefit  of  posterity  the  familiar  scenes  of  their 
every-day  theatre.  A  Petronius  gives  us  a  presentment 
of  Caesarian  Rome,  which  we  could  scarcely  piece  to- 
gether from  the  grave  historians  and  the  gay  poets.  A 
Brown  or  a  Ward  can  almost  re-create  for  us  the  little 
London  of  Queen  Anne.  A  Mercier  does  his  best  to 
present  us  with  a  faithful  picture  of  what  Paris  was 


1789.  MERCIER'S  "PICTURE   OF  PARIS."  335 

like  before  the  Revolution,  and  a  no  less  faithful  picture 
of  its  changed  condition  after  the  Revolution  was  ac- 
complished. Citizen  Mercier  was  a  wonderful  man,  and 
his  "  Picture  of  Paris  "  is  a  wonderful  book.  He  began 
it  when  Paris  was  to  all  appearance  the  tranquil  city 
of  a  stately  and  secure  dynasty ;  he  brought  it  to  a 
close  just  a  year  before  Saint-Antoine  shook  itself  from 
sleep,  and  shook  the  house  of  Capet  into  chaos.  The 
first  volume  of  the  "  Picture  of  Paris  "  was  published 
anonymously.  The  Parisian  police  disliked  it,  and 
sniffed  for  the  author;  Mercier  coolly  avowed  himself 
— he  never  wanted  courage — and  stalked  off  into  volun- 
tary exile  in  pleasant  Neufchatel,  where  he  finished  his 
task  in  peace.  What  a  debt  we  owe  to  the  solitary, 
sturdy,  indefatigable  man  !  It  is  very  much  to  be 
feared  that  nobody,  or  next  to  nobody,  reads  the  "  Tab- 
leau de  Paris"  nowadays,  and  yet  nobody  can  thorough- 
ly hope  to  understand  the  Paris  of  1789  who  has  not 
studied  it. 

Mercier  himself  said  of  his  book  that  he  wrote  it  with 
his  legs,  and  the  quaint  phrase  is  in  itself  the  highest 
indorsement  of  its  merit.  Mercier  loved  his  Paris  as 
a  cultured  American  citizen  loves  his  London;  he  ex- 
plored every  inch  of  it  patiently,  pertinaciously.  Wher- 
ever his  legs  could  carry  him,  he  went ;  whatever  his 
ears  could  hear,  whatever  his  eyes  could  see,  whatever 
his  tongue  could  ask,  he  noted,  garnered,  and  gave  as 
his  gains  to  the  world.  As  we  read  the  book,  we  seem 
for  the  moment,  like  the  councillor  in  Hans  Andersen's 
delightful  story,  who  slipped  his  feet  into  the  goloshes 
of  fortune,  to  be  transported  across  the  chasm  of  time 
and  to  live  again  in  that  earlier  age.  Nothing  prac- 
tically is  left  of  that  old  Paris.  It  would  be  as  easy 
to  discover  the  Alexandria  of  Jerome  and  of  Hypatia 


336  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cu.  XXII. 

in  the  half-Oriental,  half-Parisian  sea-city  of  the  Khe- 
dive; it  would  be  as  easy  to  conjure  up  ancient  Athens 
from  a  lounge  down  Hermes  Street,  or  to  call  up  Corinth 
from  a  survey  of  the  half  a  dozen  Doric  pillars  which 
are  all  that  remain  of  it,  as  to  re-create  the  Paris  of 
Mercier's  picture  in  the  Paris  of  the  Third  Republic. 
Directory  and  consulate,  empire  and  monarchy,  king- 
ship of  France  and  kingship  of  the  French,  republic 
and  prince-presidentship  and  empire  again,  and  yet  again 
republic,  have  rolled  in  wave  upon  wave  of  change  over 
that  old  Paris  of  Mercier's,  and  swept  it  away  far  out 
upon  the  sea  of  time.  Much  of  it  was  already  changed 
when  Mercier,  in  the  days  of  the  Directory,  set  to  work 
upon  his  "  New  Paris."  What  would  Mercier's  shade 
think  of  his  new  Paris  now,  so  Haussmannized  and  Bou- 
levardized  out  of  ghostly  recognition? 

Mercier  was  fond  of  saying  in  his  later  days,  with  a 
cheery  self-complacency,  that  he  was  the  prophet  of  the 
Revolution.  It  is  a  noteworthy  fact  that  whenever  a 
great  political  event  takes  place,  some  person  whom 
nobody  suspects  of  prophetic  powers  gets  up  and  de- 
clares himself  to  have  predicted  the  prodigy.  If  he 
sticks  to  his  text  sturdily  enough  he  will  probably  be 
accepted  in  his  prophet  part,  and  no  doubt  Mercier 
found  his  believers.  But  it  is  difficult  to  discover  any 
trace  of  the  prophecy.  A  certain  unconscious  prophecy, 
indeed,  is  to  be  found  in  the  "  Picture  of  Paris,"  for 
Mercier  with  his  frank  realism  described  the  squalor,  the 
poverty,  and  the  pain  which  cankered  the  painted  city. 
He  declares  that  his  faithful  pencil  found  within  the 
walls  of  the  capital  more  of  hideous  misery  than  of  hon- 
est ease,  more  of  grief  and  disquiet  than  of  the  joy  and 
gayety  popularly  attributed  to  the  Paris  people.  But 
his  noting  of  these  causes  led  Mercier  no  more  to  any 


1789.  MERCIER.  337 

deduction  of  possible  events  therefrom  than  the  power- 
ful picture  in  "  Faublas  "  impressed  Louvet  to  any  pur- 
pose. On  the  contrary,  we  shall  find  in  the  "  Picture 
of  Paris"  a  prophecy  so  laughably,  so  ridiculously  un- 
lucky, that  it  is  almost  enough  to  cover  poor  Mercier's 
name  with  unquenchable  ridicule.  Any  kind  of  dis- 
turbance in  Paris,  he  declares,  which  might  degenerate 
into  serious  sedition  has  become  morally  impossible. 
The  watchfulness  of  the  police,  the  regiments  of  Swiss 
guards — there  is  a  curious  unconscious  tragedy  in  this 
touch — and  of  French  guards  embarracked  and  ready 
to  march  at  a  moment's  notice,  not  to  speak  of  the  vast 
number  of  men  devoted  to  the  interests  of  the  court, 
all  seem  well  adapted  to  repress  at  any  time  any  ap- 
pearance of  a  serious  revolt,  and  to  maintain  that  calm 
which  becomes  the  more  assured  the  longer  it  endures. 
Thus  complacently  Mercier,  prophet  of  the  Revolution, 
assured  the  world  of  the  impossibility  of  Revolution. 
But,  as  if  to  make  assurance  doubly  sure,  Mercier  went 
on  to  consider  what  might  be  done  in  the  absurdly  un- 
likely case  of  the  Parisian  ever  asserting  himself  un- 
pleasantly. If  the  Parisian,  he  said,  who  has  his  in- 
stants of  effervescence,  should  really  rise  in  mutiny,  he 
would  promptly  be  shut  up  in  the  vast  cage  he  inhab- 
its, his  grain  would  be  cut  off  from  him,  and  when  he 
had  nothing  more  to  eat  in  the  larder,  he  would  very 
soon  have  to  knuckle  down  and  plead  for  pity.  Alas 
and  alas  for  the  prophet  of  the  Revolution  !  The  in- 
stant of  effervescence  became  a  geyser  spring ;  the 
scarcity  of  bread  was  bad  for  the  baker;  and  insurgent 
Paris  did  no  knuckling  down  at  all,  but  enforced  that 
process  upon  its  oppressors.  Never  was  a  prophet  more 
wof  ully  out  That  touch  about  the  Swiss  guards  is  the 
one  thing  not  wholly  laughable  in  the  whole  absurd 
I.— 22 


338  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

prediction.  There  came  a  time,  indeed,  long  later,  when 
Paris,  girt  with  steel,  and  forced  by  famine,  was  com- 
pelled to  yield  after  a  heroic  defence,  but  there  was  no 
dream  of  such  a  possibility  in  Mercier's  mind  then; 
nor  in  any  man's  mind  for  nearly  three  generations  to 
come. 

Let  any  one  who  wants  to  understand  his  French 
Revolution  get,  if  he  can,  a  map  of  Paris  of  a  date  as 
near  as  may  be  to  its  outbreak.  Such  a  map  is  before 
me  now  as  I  write  :  "  Plan  de  la  Ville  et  Faubourgs  de 
Paris,  avec  tous  ses  Accroissemens  et  la  Nouvelle  En- 
ceinte des  Barrieres  de  cette  Capitale.  A  Paris:  chez 
Mondhare  et  Jean,  rue  Sainct  Jean  de  Beauvais,  pres 
celle  de  Noyers,  1789."  This  solemn  setting  forth  is 
surrounded,  as  was  the  good  old  graceful  fashion  of  an- 
tique map-makers,  with  an  elaborate  allegorical  device 
in  which  a  nude  nymph,  no  doubt  intended  to  represent 
the  deity  of  the  Seine,  pours  water  from  a  jar  at  the 
left,  while  three  baby  Hermes  at  the  right  count  over 
money  on  a  corded  box,  and  represent,  no  doubt,  indus- 
try, commerce,  and  the  like.  A  river  with  a  comically 
stiff  bridge,  a  triumph  of  the  engineering  art,  is  in  the 
background,  and  over  all  at  the  top  are  emblazoned  the 
arms  of  the  good  city  of  Paris  in  the  congenial  com- 
pany of  overflowing  horns  of  plenty  and  a  pair  of 
globes.  It  is  impossible  to  look  at  this  faded  fantas- 
tical old  map  without  emotion.  Here  on  that  square  of 
dirty  yellowed  paper  lies  old  Paris,  the  Paris  that  Mer- 
cier  saw,  that  Burke  and  Johnson  and  Charles  James 
Fox  visited,  that  Marie  Antoinette  queened  it  over,  that 
Beaumarchais  set  laughing,  that  Voltaire  beheld  with 
dying  eyes,  that  Mirabeau  loved.  Little  men  thought 
of  what  the  Revolution  was  to  do  when  that  old  map 
was  printed,  with  its  gardens  of  the  "  Thuilleries,"  and 


1789.  AN   OLD   MAP.  339 

its  Place  Louis  XV.,  and  above  all,  with  its  duly  re- 
corded Bastille. 

With  such  a  map  for  basis  of  operations,  the  curious 
student  of  history  can  now,  if  he  pleases,  reconstruct 
for  himself  the  city  of  Paris  as  it  appeared  to  the  eyes 
of  its  visitors  one  hundred  years  ago.  M.  Albert  Ba- 
beau,  who  has  done  so  much  and  such  excellent  work 
in  bringing  the  France  of  the  Old  Order  home  to  the 
readers  of  French  history,  whose  studies  of  the  town, 
the  village,  the  rural  and  the  military  life  during  the 
Ancien  Regime  are  already  classics,  has  added  greatly 
to  the  debt  the  world  owes  him  by  his  elaborate  and 
exhaustive  study  of  Paris  in  1789.  What  M.  Auguste 
Maquet  did  for  the  Paris  of  the  Sun-King  in  his  de- 
lightful and  magnificent  "  Paris  sous  Louis  XIV.,"  M. 
Babeau  has  done  for  the  Paris  of  wellnigh  a  century 
later.  With  these  two  works,  with  the  labors  of  the 
Bibliophile  Jacob,  with  the  magnum  opus  of  M.  Hippo- 
lyte  Gautier,  "L'An  1789,"  the  student  can  almost  re- 
mould that  lost  Paris  of  the  year  of  Revolution,  can 
with  a  little  pains  conjure  it  up  for  himself,  and  see  it 
almost  as  vividly  as  it  seemed  to  the  eyes  of  those  dep- 
uties from  all  the  corners  of  France  who  came  toiling 
across  the  country  roads  to  be  present  at  the  opening 
of  the  States-General.  With  "  Paris  a  travers  les  Ages," 
with  Herder's  inestimable  volumes,  "  written  with  his 
legs,"  with  A.  de  Champeaux's  "Les  Monuments  de 
Paris,"  with  Pierre  Bujon's  "  Petite  Histoire  de  Paris," 
his  apparatus  is  fairly  complete.  He  is  indeed  addi- 
tionally fortunate  if  he  possess  or  can  gain  access  to 
the  magnificent,  monumental,  and  rare  "Tableaux  de  la 
Revolution  Fran9aise,"  a  sumptuous  folio  in  three  vol- 
umes, which  the  Restoration  suppressed  in  1816,  and 
of  which  we  are  lucky  enough  to  own  one  of  the  few 


340  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

remaining  copies.  He  will  do  well,  too,  in  getting  hold 
of  the  quaint  little  work  in  two  volumes,  "Nouvelle 
Description  des  Curiosites  de  Paris,"  published  in  the 
year  1791,  which  gives  in  alphabetical  order  a  vast 
amount  of  information  about  the  city  of  Mercier's  days. 
But  though  a  knowledge  of  these  chief  works  on  Paris 
is  precious,  M.  Babeau  is  such  a  master  of  condensation 
and  skilful  presentation  that  with  his  work  alone  the 
student  may  get  a  very  satisfactory  picture  of  what 
Paris  was  like  on  the  eve  of  the  Revolution. 

It  is  difficult  now  to  find  any  hints  of  old  Paris  in 
the  Paris  of  to-day.  Mercier,  indeed,  after  the  Revo- 
lution found,  as  he  shows  in  his  "  Nouveau  Tableau," 
much  of  the  city  that  he  had  described  before  the  Rev- 
olution as  completely  a  thing  of  the  past  as  Babylon  or 
Troy  Town.  But  still,  in  the  days  when  Charles  Lamb 
visited  Paris,  when  Thackeray  first  visited  Paris,  when 
Carlyle  first  visited  Paris,  some  half  a  century  ago,  it 
was  far  more  possible  for  the  traveller  to  conjure  up 
some  image  of  the  city  of  Desmoulins  and  Dauton,  of 
Besenval  and  Lauzun,  than  it  now  is  after  the  Hauss- 
mannizing  of  the  Second  Empire  and  the  energy  of  the 
Third  Republic.  When  one  thinks  that  the  custom  of 
giving  names  to  the  streets  was  only  sixty  years  old, 
having  been  begun  for  the  first  time  in  1728,  when  one 
thinks  that  any  system  of  numeration  for  houses  only 
began  at  the  same  time,  and  was  carried  out  in  the 
clumsiest  way,  the  existing  system  not  coming  into 
use  until  seventeen  years  after  the  Revolution  began,  in 
1806,  one  begins  to  understand  how  far  off  one  is  from 
the  city  into  which  Faublas  rode  with  his  father  on  the 
memorable  occasion. 

Happily  for  us,  however,  we  are  in  something  of  the 
position  of  Lesage's  hero  when  the  limping  devil  so 


1789.  OLD  PARIS.  341 

agreeably  unroofed  Madrid  for  him.  We  may  almost 
say  that  we,  too,  have  our  Asmodeus,  that  we  can  at 
least  conjure  up  a  familiar  spirit  who  will  enable  us  to 
see  the  Paris  of  a  hundred  years  ago  almost  as  clearly 
as  if  we  had  been  present  and  beheld  it  in  the  flesh. 
For  we  can  call  up  a  witness  who  saw  Paris  with  keen, 
intelligent  English  eyes,  and  who  could  put  down  his 
impressions  very  vividly  in  his  keen  English  way;  we 
can  call  up  Arthur  Young  again,  and  ask  him  to  reveal 
old  Paris  to  us.  The  very  fact  that  Arthur  Young  saw 
Paris  as  a  stranger,  and  saw  it  as  an  Englishman,  makes 
his  account  the  more  real  and  the  more  intelligent  to  us. 
We  can  put  ourselves  in  his  place  all  the  more  readily, 
and  with  a  little  effort  can  almost  succeed  in  seeing 
what  he  saw. 

It  is  curious  to  find  that  he,  like  that  Faublas  of 
whom  we  have  spoken,  was  first  impressed  disagreeably 
by  his  arrival  in  Paris.  The  cause  of  the  disagreeable 
impression  was  not  quite  the  same,  but  the  fact  remains 
— a  curious  alliance  of  the  evidence  of  Louvet's  ficti- 
tious rascal  and  of  the  high-minded  living  Englishman. 
Being  in  a  post-chaise,  he  tells  us,  he  travelled  to  Paris, 
as  other  travellers  in  post-chaises  do,  knowing  little  or 
nothing.  For  the  last  ten  miles  he  was  eagerly  on  the 
watch  for  that  throng  of  carriages  which  near  London 
impede  the  traveller.  But  he  watched  in  vain;  for  the 
road,  quite  to  the  gates,  was,  in  comparison,  a  perfect  des- 
ert. So  many  great  roads  joined  here  that  the  stran- 
ger supposed  this  must  be  accidental.  The  entrance 
seemed  to  him  to  have  nothing  magnificent,  to  be  only 
ill  -  built  and  dirty.  To  get  to  the  Rue  de  Varenne, 
Faubourg  St.  Germain,  he  had  the  whole  city  to  cross, 
and  he  crossed  it  by  narrow,  ugly,  and  crowded  streets. 

Some  time  later,  when  he  entered  Paris  again,  he  was 


342  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

confirmed  in  his  idea  that  the  roads  immediately  leading 
to  that  capital  seemed  deserted  when  compared  with 
those  of  London.  By  what  means,  he  asked,  in  amaze- 
ment, can  the  connection  be  carried  on  with  the  coun- 
try? He  decided  that  either  the  French  must  be  the 
most  stationary  people  upon  earth,  or  the  English  must 
be  the  most  restless,  and  find  more  pleasure  in  moving 
from  one  place  to  another  than  in  resting  to  enjoy  life 
in  either.  He  shrewdly  said  that  the  roads  could  not 
be  more  solitary  if  the  French  nobility  went  to  their 
country-seats  only  when  exiled  there  by  the  court. 

In  the  beginning  Paris  struck  him  as  being  more  or 
less  like  any  other  city.  He  went  about  at  first  "  upon 
the  full  silly  gape  "  to  find  out  things  that  he  had  not 
found  before,  as  if  a  street  in  Paris  could  be  com- 
posed of  anything  but  houses,  or  houses  formed  of  any- 
thing but  brick  or  stone — or  that  the  people  in  them, 
not  being  English,  would  be  walking  on  their  heads. 
After  a  while,  however,  he  began  to  change  his  note,  to 
find  many  points  of  difference,  for  and  against.  From 
the  tower  of  the  cathedral  he  got  a  complete  view  of 
Paris.  It  seemed  a  vast  city,  even  to  his  eyes  that  had 
seen  London  from  St.  Paul's  ;  its  being  circular  gave 
an  advantage  to  Paris  ;  but  its  greatest  advantage  was 
its  atmosphere.  It  was  then  so  clear  that  he  could  have 
supposed  it  the  height  of  summer.  The  clouds  of  coal- 
smoke  that  enveloped  London  always  prevented  a  dis- 
tinct view  of  that  capital,  but  Arthur  Young  took  it  to  be 
one-third  at  least  larger  than  Paris.  The  buildings  of 
the  parliament-house  were  disfigured  for  him  by  a  gilt 
and  tawdry  gate,  and  a  French  roof.  The  Hotel  de  la 
Monnaie  he  thought  a  fine  building,  and  the  fa9ade  of 
the  Louvre  one  of  the  most  elegant  in  the  world.  These 
pleased  him  because  they  had,  to  the  eye,  no  roofs.  In 


1?89.  PARIS  AND   LONDON.  343 

proportion,  he  says,  as  the  roof  is  seen  a  building  suffers, 
and  he  adds  that  he  does  not  recollect  one  edifice  of 
distinguished  beauty,  unless  with  domes,  in  which  the 
roof  was  not  so  flat  as  to  be  hidden,  or  nearly  so.  What 
eyes,  he  asked,  must  the  French  architects  have  had,  to 
have  loaded  so  many  buildings  with  coverings  of  a 
height  destructive  of  all  beauty  ?  "  Put  such  a  roof  as 
we  see  on  the  parliament-house  or  on  theThuilleries  upon 
the  fa§ade  of  the  Louvre,  and  where  would  its  beauty 
be?"  At  night  he  went  to  the  Opera,  which  he  thought 
a  good  theatre,  till  he  was  told  it  was  built  in  six  weeks; 
and  then  it  became  good  for  nothing  in  his  eyes,  for  he 
immediately  supposed  it  would  be  tumbling  down  in  six 
years.  "Durability  is  one  of  the  essentials  of  build- 
ing ;  what  pleasure  would  a  beautiful  front  of  painted 
pasteboard  give  ?"  The  Alceste  of  Gluck  was  per- 
formed by  Mademoiselle  St.  Huberti,  whom  he  consid- 
ered an  excellent  actress.  As  to  scenes,  dresses,  dec- 
orations, dancing,  and  the  like,  he  admitted  that  this 
theatre  beat  the  Haymarket  to  nothing. 

Another  time  he  went  to  L'Ambigu  Comique,  which 
he  called  a  pretty  little  theatre,  with  plenty  of  rubbish 
on  it.  He  noted  the  coffee-houses  on  the  Boulevards, 
the  music,  the  noise,  the  women  of  the  town  without 
end;  everything  but  scavengers  and  lamps.  The  mud 
was  a  foot  deep ;  and  there  were  parts  of  the  Boule- 
vards without  a  single  light. 

Indeed,  Arthur  Young  was  not  much  captivated  by 
Paris.  It  is  curious  to  note  what  best  pleased  his 
sturdy  British  sense  of  the  practical.  He  liked  the 
Boulevards,  and  the  Place  Louis  XV.,  which  he  held 
was  not  properly  to  be  called  a  square,  but  a  very  noble 
entrance  to  a  great  city.  The  union  of  the  Place  Louis 
XV.  with  the  Champs  Elysees,  the  gardens  of  the  Tui- 


344  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  XXII. 

leries  and  the  Seine  he  found  open,  airy,  elegant,  and  su- 
perb, and  called  the  most  agreeable  and  best-built  part 
of  Paris.  There,  he  said,  one  could  be  clean  and  breathe 
freely.  But  by  far  the  finest  thing  he  saw  at  Paris 
was  the  Corn  Market.  That  vast  rotunda,  with  its  roof 
entirely  of  wood,  upon  a  new  principle  of  carpentry,  to 
describe  which  would,  he  declared,  demand  plates  and 
long  explanations;  that  gallery,  one  hundred  and  fifty 
yards  round,  and  as  light  as  if  suspended  by  the  fairies; 
that  ground  area,  where  wheat,  pease,  beans,  lentils, 
were  stored  and  sold  ;  those  staircases  doubly  winding 
within  each  other  to  spacious  apartments  for  rye,  barley, 
and  oats,  won  his  agricultural  heart.  The  whole,  he 
said,  was  so  well  planned,  and  so  admirably  executed, 
that  he  knew  of  no  public  building  that  exceeded  it  in 
either  France  or  England. 

What  an  eminently  sensible  way  of  looking  at  things ! 
— very  English,  very  un-French.  How  it  would  have 
astonished  Restif  de  la  Bretonne,  who  wrote  a  little 
earlier  his  rhapsody  about  the  charm  of  those  serried 
ranks  of  beautiful  women  who  lined  the  noble  avenue 
of  the  Tuileries  on  summer  evenings,  and  during  the 
fine  days  of  spring  and  autumn.  Restif  loved  to  think 
lingeringly  of  the  attraction  of 'the  varied  groups  of 
people,  all  awakening  a  continuous  series  of  ideas  which 
charmed  the, mind,  as  the  beauty  of  those  who  gave  rise 
to  them  delighted  the  eyes.  Much  the  fantastic  novel- 
ist would  have  cared  for  the  best  possible  of  all  corn- 
markets  compared  with  that  brilliant  butterfly  scene  in 
the  Tuileries  Gardens  which  his  pen  can  re-create  for 
us.  What  a  different  Paris  the  two  men  saw !  and  yet, 
between  them,  they  help  us  to  see  it  as  it  was. 

The  streets  were  mostly  very  narrow  and  very  dirty, 
with  gutters  that  rushed  torrents  in  time  of  rain,  and 


1789.  A  BUILDING  MANIA.  345 

compelled  dandies  and  neatly  shod  damsels  to  cross  them 
on  the  backs  of  obliging  men  for  a  few  sous.  The  chief 
open  places  were  the  gardens  of  the  Tuileries  and  the 
Luxembourg,  of  the  Temple  and  the  Arsenal,  and  the 
vacant  spaces  by  the  Cathedral  of  Notre  Dame,  in  front 
of  which  a  kind  of  perennial  fair  was  carried  on,  and 
behind  which  people  amused  themselves  by  playing 
games  on  holidays.  But  three  years  earlier,  in  1786, 
the  principal  bridges  of  Paris  had  been  covered  with 
houses,  like  old  London  Bridge  and  like  the  Ponte  Vec- 
chio  at  Florence.  Not  very  long  before,  the  famous 
Court  of  Miracles,  which  was  slowly  crumbling  into 
ruins,  after  a  long  and  fantastic  career,  had  been  swept 
away,  and  a  market  was  established  on  its  site.  There 
were  an  astonishing  number  of  churches — enough  to  have 
amazed  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley — destined,  many  of  them, 
to  fall  before  the  fury  of  the  Revolution.  In  their 
shadows  nestled,  to  the  injury  of  the  public  health,  a 
dangerous  number  of  cemeteries,  disused  or  in  use. 
Nothing,  probably,  would  have  more  impressed  the 
stranger  in  Paris  in  1789  than  the  astonishing  amount 
of  building  that  was  going  on.  A  kind  of  mania  of 
reconstruction  seemed  to  have  seized  upon  authority, 
and  in  all  directions  new  streets  were  stretching  out, 
bridges  being  projected,  and  stately  buildings  rising  to 
heaven  amid  their  scaffoldings.  Paris  might  have  been 
the  securest  city  in  the  world,  the  Old  Order  the  most 
durable  of  human  institutions,  to  judge  by  the  way  in 
which  the  administrators  of  a  system  that  was  falling 
to  pieces  occupied  themselves  with  the  rehabilitation 
of  Paris. 

The  sidewalk  took  a  long  time  to  establish  itself  in 
Paris.  London  in  the  last  century  was  an  uncomforta- 
ble place  enough,  but  it  was  a  kind  of  earthly  paradise 


346  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIL 

compared  to  Paris  as  far  as  street  comfort  and  conven- 
ience went.  In  most  of  the  Paris  streets  the  pedestri- 
ans picked  their  way  as  best  they  might  along  the  high- 
way in  common  with  all  the  wheeled  traffic.  Only  in 
a  few  favored  streets  were  strips  of  the  pavement  at 
each  side  of  the  street  marked  off  with  posts  to  form 
a  species  of  sidewalk.  This  amazed  and  irritated  Ar- 
thur Young.  It  appeared  almost  incredible  to  him,  as 
a  person  used  to  London,  how  dirty  the  streets  of  Paris 
were,  and  also  how  horribly  inconvenient  and  dangerous 
walking  was  without  a  foot-pavement.  The  dirt  seems 
to  have  surprised  every  one,  even  in  that  astonishing 
last  century,  which  set  so  little  store  by  cleanliness. 
Paris  was  famous,  or  infamous,  for  its  mud.  On  days 
when  it  rained — and  it  rained  a  good  deal  in  Paris — the 
streets  were  given  over  to  a  horrible,  glutinous,  evil- 
smelling  compound  of  earth  and  refuse  and  filth  of 
all  kinds,  which  poisoned  the  air  with  its  stench,  and 
destroyed  the  garments  to  which  it  clung.  Through 
these  streets  poured  the  interminable  procession  of 
Paris  life,  the  great,  lumbering,  gilded  carriages  of  the 
aristocracy,  painted  with  a  whole  heathen  mythology, 
and  drawn  by  four  or  six  horses,  the  many  public  con- 
veyances, the  cumbrous  hackney  -  coaches  with  their 
bright  yellow  bodies,  the  mud -carts  and  water-carts. 
The  fiacres,  as  the  hackney-coaches  came  to  be  called, 
from  their  first  establishment  bearing  the  sign  of  Saint 
Fiacre,  were  dear,  dirty,  detestable,  some  two  thousand 
in  number.  Once,  we  are  told,  the  wild  Duke  of  Or- 
leans and  his  wild  companions  actually  hunted  a  stag 
through  some  of  the  streets  of  Paris.  Amid  all  the 
wheeled  traffic,  generally  going  as  fast  as  it  could  be 
driven,  in  defiance  of  regulations  of  police  and  the  well- 
being  of  foot-walkers,  the  Paris  population  made  its 


1789.  A   WORLD  TO  BUSTLE  IN.  34? 

way  as  well  as  it  could,  and  certainly  as  rapidly  as  it 
could. 

Long  before  1789  Montesquieu  had  hit  off  the  Pari- 
sian passion  for  rapid  motion.  In  his  Persian  Letters 
he  made  his  imaginary  Oriental  describe  a  residence  of 
a  month,  during  which  he  had  not  seen  a  single  person 
walking  at  a  foot-pace.  There  was'no  one  in  the  world 
like  a  Frenchman  to  get  over  the  ground  ;  he  ran  and 
flew.  The  mimic  Persian,  accustomed  to  walk  leisure- 
ly, sometimes  lost  all  patience ;  for,  to  say  nothing  of 
being  splashed  with  dirt  from  head  to  foot,  he  could 
not  put  up  with  being  elbowed  at  every  turn.  Some 
man  coming  up  behind  him  compelled  him  to  turn  right 
out  of  his  path,  and  then  somebody  else,  coming  in  an- 
other direction,  drove  him  back  to  the  place  from  which 
the  former  had  pushed  him;  until  before  he  had  walked 
a  hundred  yards  he  was  as  tired  as  if  he  had  been  ten 
leagues.  This  astonishing  activity  is  gravely  explained 
by  Mercier.  The  Parisian  learned  when  quite  young 
to  keep  his  footing  on  the  pavement,  to  got  out  of  the 
way  of  horses  and  carriages,  to  diminish  his  bulk  like  a 
true  Gascon,  to  jump  over  the  gutters,  to  run  up  seven 
stories  without  losing  breath,  and  to  come  down  like  a 
flash  of  lightning.  It  must  indeed  have  been  a  curious 
sight  to  look  down  from  an  upper  window  upon  the 
mass  of  carriages  of  different  kinds  which  were  going 
to  and  fro;  to  watch  the  foot-passengers,  who,  like  birds 
when  they  see  some  one  coming  with  a  gun,  flutter  off 
in  all  directions,  one  putting  his  foot  in  the  gutter  and 
splashing  himself  from  head  to  foot,  and  another  get- 
ting the  dust  driven  in  his  eyes. 

A  very  bewildering,  perplexing,  variegated  crowd  it 
was,  too,  that  jostled  and  pushed  and  hurried  its  wild, 
danse  macabre  along  the  unsavory  Paris  streets.  And 


348  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXII. 

what  a  danse  macabre  it  was!  Its  beggars  alone  would 
have  delighted  Callot.  Blind  beggars  were  numerous ; 
pickpockets  were  plentiful ;  rogues  of  all  kinds  were 
ready  to  take  advantage  of  the  throng.  The  din  was 
tremendous;  the  street-cries  alone  were  enough  to  make 
the  town  a  very  Babel.  The  sellers  of  fish,  the  sellers 
of  cakes,  the  sellers  of  gingerbread,  of  oysters,  of  or- 
anges, of  old  clothes,  all  made  it  a  point  of  honor  to  ad- 
vertise their  wares  at  the  shrillest  top  of  their  shrill 
voices.  The  women,  according  to  Mercier,  cried  like 
men,  and  the  men  like  women.  There  was  one  perpet- 
ual yelling,  which  made  it  impossible  to  describe  the 
sound  and  accent  of  all  these  multitudinous  voices  up- 
lifted in  chorus.  Auvergnat  porters  pushed  along  ; 
Savoyards  carried  sedan-chairs,  which  were  still  used; 
hawkers  of  all  kinds  filled  the  air  with  their  strange 
cries  in  commendation  of  their  wares;  beggars,  bur- 
gesses, soldiers,  nobles,  strangers,  servants,  shop-girls, 
ladies,  work-women,  all  blended  together  in  the  inces- 
sant panorama  of  the  Paris  streets.  Dangerous  in  the 
daytime,  they  were  no  less  dangerous  at  night,  for  the 
lighting  was  of  the  poorest  lantern  kind,  almost  as  bad 
as  London  in  the  days  of  Anne,  and  in  some  parts  of 
the  town  even  the  wretched  lanterns  were  not  lit  when 
there  was  a  moon.  We  can  well  understand  how  a 
stranger  would  dislike  the  Paris  streets.  Arthur  Young 
lost  his  honest  English  temper  with  those  same  streets. 
Pai-is,  he  declared,  was  in  some  respects  the  most  ineligi- 
ble and  inconvenient  city  for  the  residence  of  a  person 
of  small  fortune  of  any  that  he  had  seen,  and  was  vastly 
inferior  to  London.  It  is  curious  to  compare  with  this 
Montesquieu's  declaration  in  the  Persian  Letters  that 
Paris  was  perhaps  the  most  sensual  city  in  the  whole 
world,  and  the  one  in  which  pleasure  was  carried  to  the 


1789.  A  MOTLEY   CROWD.  349 

highest  pitch,  but  that,  at  the  same  time,  it  was  the  city 
in  which  men  lead  the  hardest  life.  Arthur  Young  was 
provoked  out  of  all  patience  by  the  narrow  streets,  the 
crowd,  the  dirt,  the  want  of  foot-pavements.  Walking, 
which  in  London  was  so  pleasant  and  so  clean  that  la- 
dies might  do  it  every  day,  was  here  a  toil  and  a  fatigue 
to  a  man,  and  an  impossibility  to  a  well-dressed  woman. 
What  especially  irritated  Arthur  Young  was  the  infin- 
ity of  one-horse  cabriolets  which  were  driven  by  young 
men  of  fashion  and  their  imitators,  alike  fools,  with  such 
rapidity  as  to  be  real  nuisances,  and  render  the  streets 
exceedingly  dangerous  without  an  incessant  caution. 
He  saw  a  poor  child  run  over  and  probably  killed,  and 
was  himself  many  times  blackened  with  the  mud  of  the 
kennels.  This  beggarly  practice  of  driving  a  one-horse 
booby-hutch  about  the  streets  of  a  great  capital  flowed 
either  from  poverty  or  despicable  economy,  and  could 
not  be  spoken  of  with  too  much  severity,  since  it  ren- 
dered Paris  an  ineligible  residence  for  persons,  particu- 
larly families  that  could  not  afford  to  keep  a  coach — a 
convenience  which  was  as  dear  as  at  London.  If  young 
noblemen  at  London,  he  proudly  reflected,  were  to  drive 
their  chaises  in  streets  without  foot-ways,  as  their  breth- 
ren do  at  Paris,  they  would  speedily  and  justly  get  very 
well  thrashed  or  rolled  in  the  kennel.  The  hackney- 
coaches  he  found  much  worse  than  in  London  ;  and 
chairs  were  rare,  as  they  ran  the  risk  of  being  driven 
down  in  the  streets.  To  this  circumstance,  also,  it  was 
owing  that  all  persons  of  small  or  moderate  fortune 
were  forced  to  dress  in  black,  with  black  stockings.  It 
was  not  so  much  the  dusky  hue  of  this  in  company  that 
annoyed  Arthur  Young  as  the  too  great  distinction 
which  it  marked  in  company  between  a  man  that  had  a 
good  fortune  and  another  that  had  not. 


350  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

These  same  black  stockings  that  annoyed  Arthur 
Young  so  much  were  something  more,  however,  than  a 
mark  of  social  inequality.  They  were  the  outward  and 
visible  proof  of  the  change  that  was  coming  over  the 
country,  of  the  increased  simplicity  in  dress,  which  was 
owing  partly  to  Rousseau,  partly  to  Marie  Antoinette, 
partly  to  the  Anglomania  of  the  Duke  d'Orleans  and  his 
set,  and  partly  to  the  spread  of  democratic  or  semi- 
democratic  opinion.  The  color  of  dress  was  nowhere 
very  brilliant,  not  so  brilliant  as  in  former  days.  Dark 
blues  and  browns,  homely  grays  and  blacks,  were  the 
chief  wear ;  the  simplicity  which  came  in  with  the  new 
ideas  had  had  its  effects  upon  daily  dress,  and  the  shin- 
ing foppery  of  the  Old  Order  had  already  begun  to 
fade.  The  trouser,  that  useful  but  singularly  ugly  gar- 
ment, had  already  begun  to  assert  itself,  and  was  worn 
by  many  instead  of  the  old  knee-breeches.  Paris  was 
still  in  1789  the  mistress  of  modes,  but  the  mode  just 
then  was  swayed  by  the  Anglomania  which  had  already 
exercised  its  sway  on  science,  on  sport,  and  on  politi- 
cal opinion.  With  the  sober  colors  and  cut  of  English 
cloth  came  other  English  customs.  Gentlemen  in  1789 
did  not  so  generally  carry  swords  as  of  old;  a  cane  was 
sufficient  unless  the  wearer  was,  as  it  were,  in  full  dress. 
While  men  still  wore  powder,  women  began  to  leave  it 
off,  and  the  amazing  head-dresses  of  the  earlier  days 
had  given  place  to  a  more  natural  arrangement  of  the 
hair.  Women's  hats  and  bonnets  were  enormous  and 
much  beribboned  and  beflowered.  A  keen  observer 
might  have  almost  predicted  from  the  change  in  Pari- 
sian dress  that  other  and  more  momentous  changes 
were  in  the  air. 

There  are  three  things  which  every  one  instinctively 
associates  with  the  last  century  and  the  Old  Order — 


1789.  THE  CAFfiS.  351 

patches,  powder,  and  periwigs — but  the  use  of  all  these 
was  already  on  the  decline  in  1789.  M.  Alfred  Frank- 
lin, in  his  interesting  and  admirable  studies,  "  La  Vie 
privee  d'Autrefois,"  claims  to  have  discovered  the  ori- 
gin of  the  use  of  the  patch.  In  a  rare  French  book,  the 
"  Diverses  Leyons"  of  Louis  Guyon,  published  in  1625, 
it  is  stated  that  at  the  end  of  the  previous  century 
physicians  sought  to  cure  the  toothache  by  applying 
to  the  temples  tiny  plasters  stretched  upon  velvet  or 
taffeta.  It  was  easy  for  a  beauty  to  perceive  that  these 
black  patches  greatly  heightened  the  whiteness  of  a  fair 
skin,  and  lent  a  certain  lustre  even  to  a  waning  com- 
plexion. The  patches  were  useless  against  the  tooth- 
ache, but  they  soon  became  an  essential  to  the  toilet. 
They  were  worn  all  through  the  seventeenth  century, 
but  they  retained  their  greatest  influence  in  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  Fantastic  poets  attributed  their  origin 
to  Cupid's  placing  a  fly  upon  the  breast  of  Venus,  and 
the  "  mouches,"  as  the  patches  were  called,  had  differ- 
ent names,  according  to  the  different  parts  of  the  face 
to  which  they  were  applied.  Thus  one  near  the  eye 
was  "  passionate,"  one  near  the  mouth  the  "  kisser,"  one 
on  the  lips  the  "  coquette,"  one  on  the  nose  the  "  im- 
pertinent," on  the  forehead  the  "majestic,"  on  the  cheek 
the  "  gallant,"  on  the  lower  lip  the  "  discreet,"  on  a  spot 
the  "  thief,"  on  the  fold  of  a  smiling  cheek  the  "  play- 
ful," and  so  on.  During  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  every 
lady  carried  her  box  of  patches,  and  as  they  were  some- 
times cut  in  quaint  devices  of  ships  and  stars  and  ani- 
mals, a  lady's  face  was  often  a  very  gallery  of  shadows. 
One  of  the  great  features  in  Paris  life  were  the  cafes, 
which  had  become  so  numerous  since  the  success  of  the 
Cafe  Procope,  and  which  continued  to  increase.  To 
these  establishments,  as  to  their  London  kindred,  the  St. 


JJ52  TilE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

James's  coffee-houses  of  the  Georgian  age,  people  re- 
sorted to  take  a  cup  of  coffee,  to  talk  and  hear  the  news. 
A  writer  of  the  time  calmly  asserts  that  the  urbanity 
and  mildness  discernible  upon  most  faces  in  Paris  was 
due  to  the  establishment  of  so  many  cafes.  Before  they 
existed,  nearly  everybody  passed  his  time  at  the  wine- 
shops—  where  even  business  matters  were  discussed. 
Since  their  establishment,  however,  people  assembled 
under  their  roofs  to  hear  what  was  going  on,  drinking 
and  playing  only  in  moderation,  with  the  consequence 
that  they  were  more  civil  and  polite,  at  least  in  appear- 
ance. The  cafes  grew  rapidly  in  number.  There  were 
six  hundred  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.  They  were  the 
daily  meeting -ground  of  the  idlers,  the  talkers,  the 
domino,  chess,  and  draught-players,  and  the  newspaper 
readers.  Billiard-rooms  were  not  added,  says  Biblio- 
phile Jacob,  until  the  Revolution,  and  no  one  would  ever 
have  ventured  to  smoke  there.  The  fondness  for  tobacco 
led  to  the  creation  of  estaminets  and  tap-rooms,  which 
ranked  much  below  the  cafes.  In  the  cafes  there  was 
little  or  no  drunkenness,  coffee  and  other  simple  drinks 
being  almost  the  only  things  supplied.  Though  they 
were,  for  the  most  part,  plain  and  little  decorated,  each 
had  its  peculiar  physiognomy;  some  of  them  quiet  even 
to  silence,  while  others  were  noisy  even  as  Babel.  The 
Cafe  de  la  Ilegence  and  the  Cafe  du  Quai  de  1'Ecole 
had  inherited  the  renown  of  the  Cafe  Procope.  Lovers 
of  gossip,  rakers-up  of  rumors,  men  of  letters,  retired 
officers,  and  strangers  formed  their  chief  customers. 

For  wilder  spirits,  caring  for  fiercer  joys  than  cof- 
fee, chess,  news,  and  scandal,  there  were  the  taverns, 
the  wine -shops,  and  above  all  the  guinguettes.  The 
guinguette  was  much  smaller  than  the  tavern,  and  the 
frequenters,  taking  their  refreshments  at  tables,  were 


1789.  THE   GUIXGUETTR  353 

regaled  with  dancing  and  singing.  We  are  told  that 
these  establishments  were  especially  numerous  in  the 
faubourgs  and  at  the  approaches  to  the  barriers,  as  at 
these  places  the  wine  and  spirituous  liquors  did  not  pay 
octroi  duty.  The  guinguette,  as  we  learn,  merely  con- 
sisted, in  most  cases,  of  a  large  tent,  around  the  inside 
of  which  were  long  rows  of  rough  deal  tables,  a  place 
being  left  vacant  in  the  centre  of  the  tent  for  the  dan- 
cers, whose  orchestra  was  made  up  of  a  squeaky  violin 
and  a  discordant  flute.  The  guinguettes  outside  Paris 
were  more  frequented,  on  account  of  their  rustic  aspect. 
They  were  veritable  arbors,  hidden  in  greenery,  stand- 
ing in  a  garden  or  shrubbery,  whence  they  were  called 
Courtilles,  which  means  plots  of  ground  planted  with 
trees.  There  was  the  Grande  Courtille  at  the  end  of 
the  Faubourg  du  Temple,  on  the  road  to  Belleville,  and 
the  Petite  Courtille,  near  the  Porcherons,  on  the  road 
to  Clichy. 

The  beautiful  Marie  Antoinette  herself  was  taken  to 
one  of  these  places  by  the  Count  d'Artois,  and  is  said 
to  have  declared  that  she  never  enjoyed  anything  so 
much  in  her  life  as  the  wild  humors  and  the  wild  dances 
of  the  place.  We  are  told  that  her  incognita  wras  re- 
spected by  those  present,  who  affected  not  to  recognize 
her.  Still  she  was  recognized,  and  the  harmless  freak 
went  its  way  to  swell  up  the  long  list  of  the  offences 
against  queenly  dignity  which  were  to  tell  so  heavily 
against  her. 

There  was  an  immense  deal  that  was  very  bright 
about  that  Old  World  Paris,  though  its  crowd  was  not 
so  brilliant  as  of  old,  and  though  there  was  such  a  pre- 
ponderance of  black  stockings.  It  was  not  always  rain- 
ing, it  was  not  all  walking  in  crowded  streets.  We 
must  remember  Restif  de  la  Bretonne's  enthusiasm 
I.— 23 


354  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXII. 

about  the  Tuileries.  We  must  remember  Dulaure's 
rhapsodies  in  his  description  of  Paris  curiosities  writ- 
ten in  1786,  when  he  avowed  that  the  old  Boulevard 
combined  all  the  attractions  longed  for  by  loungers; 
varied  sights,  splendid  houses,  and  delightful  gardens, 
down  even  to  the  cafes  and  wine -shops,  which,  with 
their  flowers  and  shrubs,  had  quite  a  fairy  appearance. 
On  the  afternoons  of  Sundays  and  Thursdays  the  Boule- 
vard was  patronized  by  the  prettiest  women  in  Paris, 
and  the  long  strings  of  carriages  were  an  ever-varying 
source  of  curiosity.  But  in  spite  of  Dulaure,  in  spite 
of  Restif  de  la  Bretonne,  it  is  not  in  the  many-tinted 
Tuileries  with  its  coveys  of  plumaged  dames,  it  is  not 
in  the  old  Boulevard  with  all  its  emphasized  splendors, 
that  we  are  to  look  for  what  was  most  characteristic  of 
the  Paris  of  1789. 

There  is  really  only  one  part  of  the  Paris  of  to-day 
where  the  student  may  for  a  moment  forget  himself 
and  fancy  that  he  is  back  again  in  the  days  when  the 
States-General  were  coming  together  and  the  Bastille 
still  lifted  its  head  over  turbulent  Saint  Antoine.  That 
is  of  course  the  Palais  Royal,  where,  if,  like  the  Mar- 
chioness, we  make-believe  very  hard,  we  can  almost 
conjure  up  the  scene  where  the  people  used  to  throng 
to  discuss  the  things  that  were  being  done  over  at  Ver- 
sailles, and  to  duck  in  the  fountains  individuals  who 
were  supposed  to  be  hostile  to  the  popular  cause.  It 
did  not  dream  indeed  of  gas  or  electric  -  light,  but  it 
made  a  brave  show  with  lamps  and  candles  at  night, 
and  was  crowded  then,  as  it  is  crowded  now,  with  the 
curious  of  all  nations.  That  part,  indeed,  which  was 
devoted  to  ladies  of  the  lightest  character  has  happily 
vanished.  It  existed  long  enough;  Balzac's  Lucien  de 
Rubempre  saw  it  when  he  came  to  Paris  to  make  his 


1789.  THE   PALAIS  ROYAL.  355 

fortune,  and  it  impressed  him  a  good  deal.  But  alto- 
gether the  Palais  Royal  of  1789  would  not  so  greatly 
differ  from  the  Palais  Royal  of  1889  if  it  did  not  lack 
its  Cafe  de  Foy. 

Ah,  that  Palais  Royal !  Taine,  in  his  "  Ancien  Re- 
gime," sighs  for  eight  days  of  the  stately  splendid  old 
Versailles  life.  We  should  rather,  we  think,  if  we  were 
to  choose,  get  a  glimpse  of  the  life  of  the  Palais  Royal. 
If  we  were  but  possessed  of  those  goloshes  of  fortune 
which  we  spoke  of  a  little  while  ago,  we  would  gladly 
wander  in  that  Palais  Royal  of  the  year  1789.  We 
would  mix  with  its  marvellous  crowd.  We  would 
study  the  shops  which  made  it  a  kind  of  world's  fair 
for  all  the  luxuries  of  both  body  and  mind.  We  would 
test  the  merits  of  the  restaurants,  the  best  and  dear- 
est in  Europe,  the  Barrier,  and  the  English  Tavern, 
the  humbler  Flemish  Grotto,  the  cafes  like  that  Cafe 
Militaire  with  its  device  "Hie  virtus  bellica  gaudet," 
and  the  Cafe  de  l']Ecole,  kept  by  Charpentier,  whose 
pretty  and  wealthy  daughter  was  wooed  by  an  obscure 
young  advocate  whose  name  was  Danton,  and  who  was 
not  always  to  be  obscure.  We  would  visit  the  wax- 
works of  Curtius,  uncle  of  Mademoiselle  Gresholtz,  who 
served  Madame  Elizabeth,  and  who  should  be  famous 
as  Madame  Tussaud.  We  should  perhaps  meet  his 
friends  Marat  and  Robespierre.  We  would  study  the 
marionette  shows  and  the  Chinese  shadows,  and  make 
our  way  into  the  lively  theatre  of  Varieties.  The  Pa- 
lais Royal  is  the  capital  of  Paris,  said  Mercier.  It  is 
the  heart,  the  brain,  the  soul  of  Paris,  said  Karamsine 
the  Russian. 

Arthur  Young  naturally  gravitated,  as  all  strangers 
did  gravitate,  to  the  Palais  Royal,  and  was  much  an- 
noyed by  the  National  Circus  there,  a  building  in  the 


356  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

gardens  of  the  palace,  which  seemed  to  him  the  most 
whimsical  and  expensive  folly  that  could  easily  be  im- 
agined. It  was  a  large  ball-room,  sunk  half  its  height 
underground  ;  and,  as  if  this  circumstance  were  not 
sufficiently  adapted  to  make  it  damp  enough,  a  garden 
was  planted  on  the  roof,  and  a  river  was  made  to  flow 
around  it,  which,  with  the  addition  of  some  spirting 
fountains,  undoubtedly  made  it  a  delicious  place  for  a 
winter's  entertainment.  Arthur  Young  angrily  reflect- 
ed that  the  expense  of  this  gewgaw  building,  the  proj- 
ect, as  he  supposed,  of  some  of  the  Duke  of  Orleans's 
friends,  would  have  established  an  English  farm,  with 
all  its  principles,  buildings,  live-stock,  tools,  and  crops, 
on  a  scale  that  would  have  done  honor  to  the  first  sov- 
ereign of  Europe  ;  for  it  would  have  converted  more 
than  five  thousand  acres  of  desert  into  a  garden.  As 
to  the  result  of  the  mode  that  had  been  pursued,  of  in- 
vesting such  a  capital,  he  knew  no  epithet  equal  to  its 
merits.  It  was  meant  to  be  a  concert,  ball,  coffee,  and 
billiard-room,  with  shops,  something  in  the  style  of  the 
London  Pantheon.  There  were  music  and  singing  on  the 
night  when  Arthur  Young  visited  it,  but  the  room  be- 
ing almost  empty,  he  found  it  equally  cold  and  sombre. 
All  round  Paris  in  the  last  century  were  the  seats  of 
princes,  of  nobles,  of  opulent  financiers.  The  city  was 
cinctured  with  stately  parks  and  ancient  woods.  At 
the  north  the  groves  of  Enghien  and  Montmorency 
led  to  the  glades  of  Compiegne.  At  the  south  lay  the 
fair  forest  of  Fontainebleau,  and  at  the  south-west  the 
rabbit-haunted  wilds  of  Rambouillet  and  the  brakes 
of  Meudon.  West  lay  Saint  Germain.  Eastward  lay 
Bondy  and  Vincennes.  The  Boulogne  wood  was  still 
sylvan  in  fact  as  in  name.  But  of  all  the  woods  the 
wood  of  Senart  was  Louis  XV.'s  favorite  hunting- 


1789.  THE  ENGLISH  GARDEN.  357 

ground,  and  of  all  his  country-seats  Louis  best  loved 
Choisy — Choisy-le-Roi,  as  it  had  come  to  be  called  from 
his  predilection  for  it.  In  the  gardens  of  Choisy,  fa- 
mous for  jasmine  and  roses,  and  thronged  with  the 
gods  and  satyrs  of  Greek  mythology,  Louis  loved  to 
linger  after  the  hunting  at  Senart.  The  gods  have 
vanished  long  ago  ;  the  roses  and  jasmine  have  disap- 
peared like  the  roses  that  the  Persian  poet  weeps ;  not 
a  trace  remains  of  the  chateau  which  Mansard  built  for 
the  great  Mademoiselle  after  the  Fronde  wars. 

But  the  two  places  near  to  Paris  of  special  interest 
to  the  stranger  were  Versailles  and  Trianon.  Arthur 
Young  went  to  both,  and  recorded  his  opinions  in  his 
usual  matter-of-fact  way.  He  had  a  letter  to  Rich- 
ard, which  procured  admittance  to  Trianon,  to  view  the 
queen's  English  Garden.  It  contained  about  one  hun- 
dred acres,  disposed  in  the  taste  he  had  read  of  in  books 
of  Chinese  gardening,  whence  it  was  supposed  that  the 
English  style  was  taken.  He  found  more  of  Sir  Will- 
iam Chambers  there  than  of  Mr.  Brown  —  more  effort 
than  nature  —  and  more  expense  than  taste.  He  ob- 
served that  it  was  not  easy  to  conceive  anything  that 
art  could  introduce  in  a  garden  that  was  not  there : 
woods,  rocks,  lawns,  lakes,  rivers,  islands,  cascades,  grot- 
tos, walks,  temples,  and  even  villages.  He  admitted 
that  parts  of  the  design  were  pretty,  and  well  executed. 
The  chief  fault  was  too  much  crowding ;  which  led  to 
another,  that  of  cutting  the  lawn  by  too  many  gravel 
walks — an  error  to  be  seen  in  almost  every  garden  Ar- 
thur Young  met  with  in  France.  But  the  glories  of 
La  Petite  Trianon,  in  his  eyes,  were  the  exotic  trees 
and  shrubs.  The  world  had  been  successfully  rifled  to 
decorate  it  with  curious  and  beautiful  plants  to  please 
the  eye  of  ignorance,  and  to  exercise  the  memory  of 


358  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXII. 

science.  Of  the  buildings,  the  Temple  of  Love  seemed 
to  him  truly  elegant. 

The  palace  of  Versailles,  however,  one  of  the  objects 
of  which  report  had  given  him  the  greatest  expectation, 
made  no  impression  on  him;  he  viewed  it  without  emo- 
tion. Nothing  could  compensate  him  for  its  want  of 
unity.  From  whatever  point  he  viewed  it,  it  appeared 
to  him  an  assemblage  of  buildings;  a  splendid  quarter 
of  a  town,  but  not  a  fine  edifice — an  objection  from 
which  even  the  beautiful  garden-front  was  not  free. 
The  great  gallery  was  the  finest  room  he  saw;  the  other 
apartments  were  nothing ;  but  the  pictures  and  statues 
he  hailed  as  a  capital  collection.  The  whole  palace,  ex- 
cept the  chapel,  seemed,  to  his  surprise,  to  be  open  to 
all  the  world;  for  he  tells  us  that  he  pushed  through 
an  amazing  crowd  of  all  sorts  of  people,  many  of  them 
not  very  well  dressed.  But  the  officers  at  the  door  of 
the  apartment  in  which  the  king  dined  made  a  distinc- 
tion, and  would  not  permit  all  to  enter  promiscuously. 

At  another  time  he  again  visited  Versailles,  and  was 
again  surprised.  While  viewing  the  king's  apartment, 
which  he  had  not  left  a  quarter  of  an  hour,  Arthur 
Young  was  amused  to  see  the  blackguard  figures  that 
were  walking  uncontrolled  about  the  palace,  and  even 
in  his  bedchamber.  The  rags  of  these  men  betrayed 
them  to  be  in  the  last  stage  of  poverty,  and  the  English 
stranger  was  the  only  person  who  stared  and  wondered 
how  the  devil  they  got  there.  It  was  impossible  for 
the  English  stranger  not  to  like  this  careless  indiffer- 
ence and  freedom  from  suspicion.  He  declared  that  he 
loved  the  master  of  the  house,  who  would  not  be  hurt 
or  offended  at  seeing  his  apartment  thus  occupied  if  he 
returned  suddenly. 

The  curious  mixture  of  magnificence  and  dirt  which 


1*789.  CONCERNING  THE  BATH.  359 

characterized  Paris  was  not  unchai'acteristic  of  its  peo- 
ple. It  must  be  confessed  that  in  some  respects  the  re- 
finement of  the  last  century  was  disagreeably  artificial, 
the  thin  veneer  that  cloaked  a  great  deal  of  coarseness. 
Washing  of  the  person  was,  unhappily,  an  infrequent 
process.  A  modern  gentleman,  accustomed  to  cleanli- 
ness from  his  youth  upward,  would  be  beyond  measure 
disgusted  if  he  could  step  back  for  half  an  hour  into 
the  Paris  of  the  polite  last  century  at  the  very  filth 
with  which  luxurious  living  was  environed.  Sanitary 
arrangements  were  of  the  most  primitive,  most  detest- 
able kind.  It  is  unpleasant  to  think  that  the  stately 
palace  of  Versailles  was  chiefly  characterized  to  its  fa- 
miliars by  its  abominable  smells.  Bathing  of  the  body 
as  a  daily  institution,  even  for  the  nobility,  was  practi- 
cally unknown.  A  palace  did  not  always  think  it  nec- 
essary to  include  a  bath-room  among  its  appointments. 
There  were  indeed  public  bath-houses  upon  the  river, 
but  they  were  few  in  number,  and  the  semi  -  private 
bath-houses  had  a  certain  shadiness  of  character.  Peo- 
ple of  the  middle  classes  who  wished  to  take  a  bath 
could  hire  one  from  an  ironmonger  for  a  few  pence. 
These  baths  were  shaped  something  like  the  shoe  of 
the  old  lady  who  had  so  many  children  that  she  didn't 
know  what  to  do.  Such  baths,  although  no  doubt 
highly  uncomfortable,  had  the  advantage,  in  economic 
eyes,  of  requiring  less  water  than  those  of  more  oblong 
shape.  In  the  houses  of  great  nobles  baths  were  of 
a  more  luxurious  nature,  and  were  fashioned  in  many 
forms,  all  seeking  after  the  comfort  of  the  human  body. 
It  is  a  curious  example  of  the  manners  of  the  day  that 
great  ladies  did  not  hesitate  to  receive  their  friends, 
male  as  well  as  female,  while  in  their  baths.  Decency 
was,  however,  respected.  A  pint  or  two  of  milk,  or  a 


3(}0  THE   FREXCII   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

quantity  of  prepared  essence,  rendered  the  water  white 
and  opaque.  Some  baths,  again,  were  covered  with  a 
perforated  lid,  which  left  the  bulk  of  the  body  quite 
concealed  while  still  permitting  evaporation.  In  many 
cases,  too,  ladies  took  their  baths  enveloped  in  a  bath- 
ing-gown from  head  to  foot.  Madame  Campan  de- 
clares that  Marie  Antoinette  was  so  particular  in  this 
respect  that  she  always  bathed  clad  in  a  long  flannel 
robe  buttoned  up  to  the  neck,  and  when  she  left  the 
bath  she  always  insisted  on  having  a  cloth  held  up  be- 
fore her  to  conceal  her  from  the  eyes  of  her  women. 
This  statement  is  curiously  and  decisively  in  contradic- 
tion with  that  of  Soulavie,  in  his  memoirs  of  the  reign 
of  Louis  XVL,  in  which  he  records  the  incredible  story 
of  a  visit  paid  to  the  queen  by  an  aged  and  eminently 
virtuous  ecclesiastic.  On  entering  the  room  he  found 
the  queen,  entirely  naked,  in  her  bath.  He  was  about 
to  retire,  but  the  queen  called  him  to  her  side,  and  held 
him  for  some  time  in  unwilling  converse,  compelled  to 
admire  "the  fairest  form  that  nature  ever  moulded." 
The  story  would  seem  on  the  face  of  it  to  be  apocry- 
phal, but  it  is  certain  that  some  great  ladies  made  no 
scruple  of  being  seen  completely  unclothed,  at  their 
toilet  or  in  their  bath,  by  the  male  lackeys,  and  this 
from  no  indecency,  but  from  their  contemptuous  uncon- 
sciousness that  a  lackey  could  be  regarded  as  anything 
but  an  automaton. 

Gouverneur  Morris  gives  some  very  remarkable  pict- 
ures of  the  freedom  of  social  life  in  Paris  in  this  regard. 
On  May  27, 1789,  he  called  on  Madame  de  la  Suze.  "  She 
is  just  going  to  dress,  but  that  is  nothing."  "  M.  Morris 
me  permettra  de  faire  ma  toilette  ?"  "  Certainly."  So 
we  have  the  whole  performance  of  undressing  and  dress- 
ing except  the  shift.  On  July  26th  in  the  same  year  he 


1752-1816.  MADAME    DE   FLAIIAUT.  361 

notes  :  "  At  five  go  by  appointment  to  Madame  de  Fla- 
haut's.  She  is  at  her  toilet.  Monsieur  comes  in.  She 
dresses  before  us  with  perfect  decency,  even  to  her  shift." 
That  same  year,  November  13th,  Madame  de  Flahaut, 
says  Mr.  Morris,  "  being  ill,  goes  into  the  bath,  and  when 
placed  there  sends  for  me.  It  is  a  strange  place  to  re- 
ceive a  visit,  but  there  is  milk  mixed  with  the  water, 
making  it  opaque.  She  tells  me  that  it  is  usual  to  re- 
ceive in  the  bath,  and  I  suppose  it  is,  for  otherwise  I 
should  have  been  the  last  person  to  whom  it  would 
have  been  permitted." 

Madame  de  Flahaut,  who  was  so  frank  in  this  respect, 
was  a  very  charming  woman,  who  impressed  every  one 
she  met  from  Montesquieu  and  Talleyrand  to  the  clever, 
whimsical,  conceited  Gouverneur  Morris,  who  was  des- 
tined to  be  a  good  friend  to  her  in  later  days.  She  was 
very  beautiful,  very  witty;  she  wrote  romances  and  talk- 
ed philosophies  ;  she  was  unhappily  married  to  a  man 
much  older  than  herself,  the  dissipated,  indifferent  Count 
de  Flahaut — for  whom  the  guillotine  waits.  Talleyrand, 
then  Abbe  de  Perigord,  was  her  friend,  her  lover,  and 
the  father  of  her  child  Charles,  named  after  him.  Pos- 
sibly this  may  have  influenced  Morris  when  he  wrote  of 
the  abbe  :  "  He  appears  to  be  a  sly,  cunning,  ambitious, 
and  malicious  man.  I  know  not  why  conclusions  so  dis- 
advantageous to  him  are  formed  in  my  mind,  but  so  it 
is  ;  I  cannot  help  it." 

Gouverneur  Morris  is  of  immense  value  to  us  in  ena- 
bling us  to  appreciate  the  social  life  of  Paris  on  the  eve 
of  the  Revolution.  Born  in  1752,  he  had  been  excep- 
tionally well  educated ;  his  father  had  desired  that  he 
should  have  "the  best  education  that  is  to  be  had  in 
England  or  America."  In  his  young  manhood  he  de- 
voted himself  to  the  law;  when  the  Revolution  broke 


362  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXII. 

out  he  played  a  prominent  part  in  asserting  the  need  for 
American  independence,  and  was  gallantly  prepared  "to 
fall  on  the  last  bleak  mountain  in  America  rather  than 
yield."  He  was  with  Washington  during  the  long  win- 
ter at  Valley  Forge,  and  earned  the  lifelong  friendship 
of  the  American  leader.  In  1780,  in  consequence  of  an 
accident  in  Philadelphia,  Morris  had  to  have  his  left  leg 
amputated  below  the  knee,  and  for  the  remainder  of  his 
life  we  learn  that  he  wore  a  wooden  leg  of  primitive  sim- 
plicity, "  not  much  more  than  a  rough  oak  stick  with  a 
wooden  knob  at  the  end  of  it."  Such  was  the  man  who, 
in  the  February  of  1789,  found  himself  in  Paris  on  some 
business  of  his  own  and  his  brother's  concerning  the  ship- 
ment of  tobacco  to  France.  His  excellent  introductions 
brought  him  into  the  best  Parisian  society,  and  his  keen, 
quick  appreciations  of  all  he  saw  render  his  diary  and 
letters  second  only  in  importance  to  Arthur  Young's 
writings  in  dealing  with  the  time.  With  a  good  deal 
of  conceit,  and  a  good  deal  of  humor,  he  stumped  his 
way  through  the  bright  Parisian  society,  often  amazed 
at  its  morality,  often  amused  at  its  behavior,  always  in- 
telligent, appreciative,  and  reliable.  If  he  seems  to  have 
believed  that  he  could  easily  set  things  right  in  France 
if  he  had  the  chance,  he  only  shared  a  delusion  common 
to  many  persons  less  intelligent  than  himself.  A  little 
later  in  this  year  of  1789  he  and  his  enchanting  Ma- 
dame de  Flahaut  began  to  scheme  out  the  ideal  policy 
for  the  hour.  Her  suggestions  that  Mirabeau  should 
be  sent  to  Constantinople,  and  Lauzun  to  London,  do 
not  say  much  for  her  diplomacy.  Morris's  great  idea 
was  that  Madame  de  Flahaut  should  command  the  queen, 
whom  he  described  as  "  weak,  proud,  but  not  ill-tem- 
pered, and,  though  lustful,  yet  not  much  attached  to 
her  lovers,"  so  that  a  superior  mind — Madame  de  Fla- 


1752-1816.  GOUVERNEUR    MORRIS.  363 

haul's  superior  mind  —  "would  take  that  ascendency 
which  the  feeble  always  submit  to,  though  not  always 
without  reluctance."  Madame  de  Flahaut  seemed  to  be 
pleased  with  Morris's  plan,  and  declared  that  she  would 
take  care  to  keep  the  queen  supplied  with  an  alternat- 
ing succession  of  gallants  and  masses.  It  was  impos- 
sible, Morris  thought,  not  to  approve  of  such  a  regime, 
and  felt  confident  that  "  with  a  due  proportion  of  the 
former  medicine  "  Madame  de  Flahaut  "  must  supplant 
the  present  physician."  After  all,  outsiders  do  not  al- 
ways see  most  of  the  game. 


364  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 


CHAPTER  XXIII. 

THE     PEOPLE     OF     PARIS. 

SUCH  was  Paris  in  that  memorable  year  1789,  a  huge 
hive  of  humanity,  more  animated,  more  excited  than  it 
had  ever  been  before  in  all  the  course  of  its  turbulent 
history.  The  decision  of  the  king  and  his  ministers  to 
summon  the  States-General  had  aroused  the  keenest  ex- 
citement in  every  part  of  the  city.  Every  section  of 
the  social  scale  shared  in  and  swelled  the  general  stir. 
In  the  salons,  in  the  clubs,  in  the  wine-shops,  in  the  cof- 
fee-houses, in  the  streets,  above  all,  in  the  Palais  Royal, 
Paris  buzzed  and  fluttered  and  discussed  and  doubted 
and  wrangled,  and  was  perturbed  or  hopeful  according 
to  its  mood.  Let  us  study  some  of  these  centres  of  ex- 
citement and  see  what  they  are  doing. 

Parisian  society  still  thronged  its  various  salons,  still 
glittered  in  satins  and  embroideries,  silks  and  laces  ; 
the  courtly  clink  of  swords  was  still  heard,  and  the  rus- 
tle of  hoops.  The  salons  still  made  up  a  world  of  pow- 
der and  of  patches,  but  they  were  not  the  salons  of  old 
time,  for  which  some  eighteenth  century  Villon  might 
weep,  the  salons  of  the  Regency  or  the  Fifteenth  Louis, 
the  salons  of  light  wit,  the  salons  of  fashionable  science 
and  patronized  Encyclopaediaism.  Politics  have  turned 
all  heads,  and  the  salons  have  mostly  become  political 
centres.  Madame  de  Sabran  swayed  the  most  aristo- 
cratic of  the  salons  that  professed  reaction  and  clung  to 
the  court  principles.  To  her  rooms  came  the  fine  flower 


1738-1815.  MADAME  DE   SABRAN.  365 

of  the  nobility,  the  wits  and  politicians,  who  thought 
that  the  Old  Order  could  still  somehow  be  bolstered  up. 
Madame  de  Sabran  was  no  longer  in  the  enjoyment  of 
that  first  youth  which  made  her  so  famous  some  twelve 
years  earlier.  Madame  Vigee-Lebrun,  to  whom  we  owe 
so  living  a  knowledge  of  so  many  of  the  lords  and  la- 
dies of  that  old  time,  has  left  a  ravishing  picture  of  Ma- 
dame de  Sabran.  It  shows  her  dark  eyes  smiling  di- 
vinely under  their  beautiful  brown  lashes,  the  beautiful 
face  beneath  its  cloud  of  fair  hair,  the  exquisitely  fine 
skin,  the  daintily  delicate  body,  which  conquered  the 
heart  of  the  audacious  and  brilliant  Chevalier  de  Bouf- 
flers.  Madame  de  Sabran  was  a  woman  of  wit,  a  wom- 
an of  taste  and  scholarship  ;  her  wit,  her  taste,  her 
scholarship,  and  her  beauty  captivated  De  Boufflers  in 
1777,  when  she  was  twenty-seven  and  he  was  thirty- 
nine.  Madame  de  Sabran  returned  the  passion  of  De 
Boufflers,  and  for  the  rest  of  her  life  was  devoted  to 
him.  He  was  now  in  1789  the  chief  ornament  of  her 
salon,  and  one  of  the  most  remarkable,  one  of  the  most 
typical  figures  of  that  antique  world. 

The  brilliant  figure  of  the  Chevalier  de  Boufflers 
shines  eccentrically  radiant  through  the  whole  revolu- 
tionary period.  He  is  indeed  a  wandering  star  :  the 
Old  Order  is  to  be  seen  at  its  best  in  him.  His  por- 
traits confirm  what  the  praises  of  his  contemporaries 
assert,  that  he  was  singularly  attractive.  The  gracious 
oval  of  his  face  is  instinct  with  a  witty  intelligence  ; 
his  bright  eyes  seem  to  question  mockingly  ;  his  nose 
is  large  and  sensual;  so  are  the  large  firm  lips,  but  their 
sensuality  is  tempered  by  a  sense  of  cynic  humor.  The 
son  of  that  Madame  de  Boufflers  who  was  so  dear  to 
the  old  King  Stanislas  of  Poland,  Louis  XV.'s  father- 
in-law,  young  De  Boufflers  was  originally  destined  for 


366  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIII. 

the  Church,  not  indeed  from  any  spirit  of  belief,  but 
solely  from  ambition,  and  a  desire  that  the  red  hat  might 
some  time  shade  his  high  and  handsome  forehead.  In 
an  age  of  strange  Churchmen  there  never  was  a  stran- 
ger servant  of  the  Church  than  the  young  Abbe  de 
Boufflers.  The  traditional  Parisian  abbe  of  a  world  of 
tales  and  comedies  finds  its  finest  realization  in  this 
dainty  disciple  of  the  light-hearted  Abbe  Porquet,  this 
love-making,  verse-making  scapegrace,  who  delighted, 
like  Faust,  to  reel  from  desire  to  desire,  and  to  rhyme 
his  way  none  too  decently  through  life.  It  is  of  De 
Boufflers  that  Metra  tells  a  tale — Metra  the  journalist, 
who  tells  so  many  and  so  strange  tales.  De  Boufliers 
offended  some  great  lady  by  an  epigram  :  the  great  lady 
wrote  to  him  making  an  appointment  and  proposing  con- 
ciliation. De  Boufflers  came  to  the  appointment  with  a 
pair  of  pistols  in  his  pocket.  He  had  hardly  spoken  to 
the  lady  before  four  tall  lackeys  came  in,  who,  in  obe- 
dience to  the  lady's  command,  seized  De  Boufflers  and 
administered  a  severe  castigation.  De  Boufflers  bore  it 
composedly,  then  producing  his  pistols,  made  the  affright- 
ed lackeys,  on  pain  of  death,  administer  the  same  casti- 
gation to  his  treacherous  hostess,  and  afterwards  to  each 
other  in  turn.  This  amazing  child  of  the  Church,  whom 
Rousseau  despised  and  in  whom  Voltaire  delighted,  sud- 
denly set  the  literary  and  polite  worlds  on  fire  one  day 
by  the  little  tale,  "Aline,"  which  enraptured  Grimm, 
captivated  Madame  de  Pompadour,  and  overtaxed  the 
patience  of  his  ecclesiastical  superiors.  De  Boufliers 
was  made  aware  that  he  must  really  choose  between  let- 
ters and  the  Litany.  De  Boufliers  did  not  take  long  to 
choose.  With  a  light  heart  he  laid  down  the  cassock 
and  caught  up  the  sword,  and  fought  his  way  gallantly 
through  the  Hanover  campaign.  Yet  still  there  was 


1738-1815.  DE   BOUFFLERS.  367 

something  of  the  Churchman  in  him.  He  was  no  long- 
er an  abbe,  but  he  was  a  Knight  of  the  Order  of  Malta, 
so  that  we  have  that  strange  picture  of  him  given  by 
M.  Octave  Uzanne  in  which,  being  at  the  same  time  a 
prior  and  a  captain  of  Hussars,  he  assists  at  Divine  Of- 
fice in  the  costume  of  a  soldier-abbe,  a  long  white  sur- 
plice on  his  shoulders  and  a  long  sword  beating  against 
his  heels.  The  contradiction  which  is  here  implied  is 
really  typical  of  De  Boufflers'  entire  nature.  He  was  a 
creature  of  contradictions.  His  friend  and  emulator, 
the  Prince  de  Ligne,  in  one  of  those  exquisite  portraits 
from  his  gallery  of  contemporaries,  has  left  a  very  living 
and  charming  picture  of  the  man  who  was  in  turn  abbe, 
soldier,  author,  administrator,  deputy,  and  philosopher, 
and  who,  in  all  these  various  states,  was  out  of  place  only 
in  the  first.  Laclos  has  left  a  grimmer  portrait  of  him 
under  the  name  of  Fulber,  as  of  one  born  eighty  years 
too  late,  a  fanfaron  of  another  time  who  being  serious 
seeks  to  be  gay,  frivolous  seeks  to  be  grave,  good  would 
fain  be  caustic,  and  idle  plays  at  being  industrious.  Per- 
haps De  Boufflers  did  come  a  little  belated  into  the  world. 
His  bright  butterfly  figure  seems  out  of  place  in  the 
stormy  hours  of  1789.  Rivarol,  in  his  brisk  way, 
summed  him  merrily  up  as  a  libertine  abbe,  philosoph- 
ical soldier,  rhyming  diplomatist,  patriotic  emigrant, 
and  courtier  republican.  From  the  moment  of  meet- 
ing Madame  de  Sabran  he  took  life  and  love  a  little 
more  seriously.  It  became  his  ambition  to  win  a  posi- 
tion which  would  allow  him  to  marry  the  beautiful 
widow.  When,  in  1785,  he  was  sent  as  governor  to 
Senegambia,  he  showed  very  considerable  ability  as  an 
administrator,  and  was  heartily  regretted  by  both  blacks 
and  whites,  it  is  said,  when  he  returned  France  in  the 
end  of  1787,  and  to  his  adored  Madame  de  Sabran.  He 


368 


THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 


was  now  the  shining  light  of  Madame  de  Sabran's  salon, 
and  perhaps  we  may  as  well  part  company  with  him 
here.  He  got  elected  to  the  States-General  as  a  noble 
deputy;  he  played  no  considerable  part  in  the  Assem- 
bly; in  1790,  he  with  Malouet,  La  Rochefoucauld-Lian- 
court,  and  others,  founded  the  "  Impartials "  club ;  he 
married  Madame  de  Sabran,  emigrated,  came  back  to 
France  under  Bonaparte  with  all  his  light  wit  worn  out 
of  him,  settled  down  as  a  kind  of  gentleman-farmer,  and 
died  in  the  January  of  the  year  of  Waterloo.  He  wrote 
himself  an  epitaph,  which  may  be  thus  rendered: 

"Here  lies  a  lord  who  without  ceasing  sped; 
Born  on  the  highway,  there  he  lived,  and  dead 
He  lies  there  still  to  justify  the  Sage, 
Who  says  that  life  is  but  a  pilgrimage." 

No  less  characteristic  of  their  age  were  the  two 
brothers,  Louis  Philippe  de  Segur  and  Joseph  Alexan- 
dre  de  Segur,  the  Castor  and  Pollux  of  the  Royalist 
salons.  The  elder  brother,  Louis,  born  in  1753,  was 
noted  for  a  kind  of  grave  sweetness,  a  gallantry  and 
address  which  had  in  them  a  reserve,  almost  an  air  of 
melancholy,  which  gave  them  an  additional  charm.  An 
impassioned  Voltairean  in  his  youth,  he  was  destined  in 
his  time  to  play  the  part  of  a  kind  of  glorified  Vicar  of 
Bray,  and  to  serve  a  variety  of  autocratic  masters  with 
a  whimsical  indifference  to  the  liberalism  of  his  early 
years.  Madame  de  Sabran  did  not  esteem  him  too 
highly  when  she  described  him  in  a  biting  little  epigram 
as  an  empty-headed  philosopher  and  a  pedantic  and 
timid  rake.  We  may  think  a  little  better  of  him  if  we 
please.  He  was  a  dexterous  and  delicate  political  epi- 
grammatist; he  wooed  a  frolic  muse  like  most  young 
men  of  his  station,  and  with  an  average  success.  No 


1789.  A   UNIQUE   EPITAPH.  369 

one  has  painted  better  than  he  the  kind  of  brilliant  life 
which  the  young  nobility  lived  in  the  reign  of  Louis 
XVL,  when  "  we  saw  the  brief  years  of  our  spring- 
time wheel  by  in  a  circle  of  such  illusion,  and  such 
happiness,  as  I  think  through  all  time  was  reserved 
for  us  alone.  Liberty,  royalty,  aristocracy,  democra- 
cy, prejudices,  reason,  novelty,  philosophy,  all  united 
to  make  our  days  more  delightful,  and  never,  surely, 
was  so  terrible  an  awakening  preceded  by  so  sweet  a 
sleep  or  more  enchanting  dreams."  There  is  a  picture 
in  little  of  the  Old  Order,  as  it  seemed  to  the  eyes  of 
golden  youth  in  those  exciting,  intoxicating  days,  when 
the  new  ideas  were  blending  with  the  old  like  the  junc- 
tion of  two  rivers. 

His  brother,  the  Viscount  Alexandre,  who  was  three 
years  younger  than  Louis,  was  a  fribble  of  a  lighter 
type.  In  later  years  he  classified  himself  and  his  elder 
brother:  "  He  is  Segur  the  ceremonious ;  I  am  Segur 
without  ceremony."  In  these  days  of  the  Sabran  salon 
he  was  chiefly  distinguished  as  a  man  of  taste  and  wit, 
gliding  gracefully  through  life  with  the  support  of  a 
rose-crowned  and  rose-colored  philosophy  all  his  own. 
He  wrote  clever  little  poems ;  he  wrote  clever  little 
plays ;  he  uttered  clever  little  epigrams.  The  charac- 
ter of  the  man  may  be  best  estimated  from  this,  that 
he  found  fault  with  those  who  caused  the  Revolution 
chiefly  because  they  "  spoiled  his  Paris,"  and  "  turned 
the  capital  of  pleasures  into  a  centre  of  disputes  and 
dulness."  He  got  into  grave  royal  disfavor  once  in 
1786  for  saying  with  an  affected  gravity  at  a  social 
gathering,  when  pressed  for  the  latest  news,  that  the 
king  had  abdicated.  As  he  persisted  in  this  piece  of 
labored  witticism  with  all  possible  solemnity,  it  natural- 
ly got  bruited  abroad  and  came  to  the  king's  ears,  who 
J.— 24 


370  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 

forbade  Segur  the  court  and  Paris  for  a  season.  Segur 
had  little  idea  how  true  a  prophet  he  was,  but  when  his 
prophecy  did  come  true  it  scarcely  seemed  so  good  a 
jest.  Perhaps  he  deserves  to  be  best  remembered,  after 
all,  for  having  happily  and  certainly  ingeniously  defined 
taste  as  only  the  art  of  putting  everything  in  its  place, 
and  for  saying  that  taste  is  to  the  mind  what  grace  is  to 
beauty.  It  must  be  confessed  that  these  seem  strange 
popinjays  to  defend  a  threatened  throne  ;  they  were  as 
witty,  as  brilliant,  as  lightly  profligate  as  the  Cavaliers  of 
Charles  II.,  but  they  did  not  make  quite  so  good  a  stand 
for  the  institution  which  allowed  them  to  live  and  adorn 
the  Sabran  salon.  Madame  de  Sabran's  little  son  was 
typical  of  that  institution.  When  he  was  eight  years 
old  he  was  brought  before  the  king  and  queen  to  play 
a  part  in  Voltaire's  "  Oreste."  A  beautiful  court  lady 
began  to  talk  to  him  about  the  classic  authors,  where- 
upon the  tiny  courtier,  with  a  grave  bow,  said,  "  Ma- 
dame, Anacreon  is  the  onlypoet  I  can  think  of  here." 

Madame  de  Chambonas  held  another  and  less  select 
salon  in  defence  of  reactionary  principles.  Of  this  salon 
Rivarol  was  the  prevailing  spirit — Rivarol  the  witty, 
the  audacious,  the  violently  royalist.  The  name  of  Riv- 
Arol  has  come  to  the  front  considerably  of  late  years. 
Always  remembered  for  the  brilliant  services  he  ren- 
dered to  the  Royalist  cause,  he  has  recently,  however, 
been  made  more  of,  more  written  about,  more  thought 
of;  instead  of  being  bracketed  with  Champcenetz  or 
with  Cham  fort,  he  stands  alone,  and  is  studied  individ- 
ually. There  is  a  kind  of  sect  formed  under  the  shadow 
of  his  name,  a  sect  of  Rivarolists,  whose  mission  it  is  to 
keep  his  memory  green  and  stimulate  themselves  with 
his  writings.  The  name  of  Rivarol  does  not  appear  to 
have  been  his  name  by  any  other  right  than  the  right 


1763-1801.  RIVAROL.  371 

of  choice.  He  first  flickered  upon  Paris,  comely,  needy, 
esurient  of  success,  in  1777,  that  same  year  in  which  De 
Boufflers  first  met  Madame  de  Sabran.  He  introduced 
himself  to  D'Alembert  under  the  name  of  the  Abbe  de 
Parcieux,  De  Parcieux  being  the  name  of  a  distinguish- 
ed physician  and  geometrician  lately  dead,  with  whom 
the  warm  imagination  of  the  chestnut-haired  youth  con- 
structed a  kinship.  D'Alembert  introduced  him  to  Vol- 
taire, who  welcomed  him  well.  He  soon  began  to  make 
his  way  in  Paris,  and  to  make  enemies.  His  bitter 
tongue,  his  mordant  epigrams,  made  him  feared  and 
hated.  No  longer  bearing  the  name  of  Longchamps  or 
of  De  Parcieux,  he  was  now  the  Rivarol  who  was  to  be 
famous.  The  son  of  a  worthy  man  who  in  his  time  had 
tried  many  trades,  from  silk-weaving  to  school-teaching, 
and  from  school-teaching  to  innkeeping,  Rivarol  boldly 
declared  himself  a  descendant  of  a  stately  Italian  fam- 
ily, and,  with  a  light  heart,  elected  himself  first  chev- 
alier and  then  count.  Why,  it  has  been  asked,  while  he 
was  about  it,  did  he  not  make  himself  a  marquis  or  a 
duke? 

The  son  of  the  innkeeper  of  the  Three  Pigeons  was 
well  content  with  himself  and  his  name  and  his  rank, 
but  they  afforded  excellent  opportunities  for  his  ene- 
mies to  fasten  upon.  He  attacked  the  "  Jardins"  poem 
of  the  Abbe  Delille  with  a  critical  acridity  which  enter- 
tained Grimm,  but  which  raised  a  cloud  of  enemies 
against  the  critic.  Cerutti,  Chamfort,  La  Harpe,  and 
many  another  waged  epigrammatic  war  with  him.  It 
was  not  an  over-nice  age,  and  the  champions  of  the 
Abbe  Virgile,  as  Rivarol  called  Delille,  found  much 
sport  in  the  fact  of  Rivarol's  marriage  to  sour-tempered, 
pretty,  pedantic,  devoted,  Scotch  Miss  Flint,  from  whose 
ill-temper  Rivarol  soon  shook  himself  free,  to  the  poor 


372  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 

lady's  despair.  Rivarol's  enemies  revelled  in  his  do- 
mestic troubles  ;  it  was  a  merciless  age ;  men  fought 
like  Indian  braves,  neither  giving  nor  taking  quarter ; 
all  was  fair  in  those  hideous  literary  feuds.  But  Riva- 
rol  held  his  own.  He  bit  his  way  like  an  acid  into  so- 
ciety ;  now,  on  the  eve  of  the  Revolution,  he  was  one 
of  the  props  of  the  reactionary  party,  for  whom  he  was 
to  do  battle  so  long  and  so  courageously. 

Champcenetz  was  perhaps  a  wilder  spirit  than  Riva- 
rol.  He  was  born  in  1759,  the  son  of  one  of  the  gov- 
ernors of  the  Louvre,  and  he  rattled  through  his  earlier 
youth  in  the  liveliest  manner — a  haunter  of  taverns,  of 
fencing-schools,  of  houses  of  ill-fame,  like  a  better-class 
Fran9ois  Villon.  Desperately  dissipated,  a  sparkling 
talker,  a  skilful  stringer  of  satirical  rhymes,  he  made 
sufficient  mark  upon  his  time  by  his  super-scandalous 
reputation  to  earn  for  himself  the  honor  of  more  than 
one  incarceration  in  the  Bastille.  Wild  as  a  cavalier  of 
the  House  of  Stuart,  he  was  no  less  Royalist,  and  cher- 
ished no  hatred  to  the  Bastille  which  had  imprisoned 
him,  nor  the  institutions  which  it  represented.  He 
walked  his  wild  way  with  his  light  songs  and  his  biting 
epigrams ;  his  ideal  world  was  a  world  of  full  flagons 
and  pretty  women,  and  the  new  revolutionary  spirit  was 
not  in  the  least  to  his  liking,  nor  to  the  liking  of  such 
as  he.  Against  the  bitter  epigrammatist  bitter  epigram 
was  employed  to  some  purpose.  There  is  a  description 
of  Champcenetz  extant  written  by  Rulhiere,  which  is  as 
severe  and  stinging  as  Champcenetz  could  himself  have 
written.  "  To  be  hated  but  not  to  be  feared,  to  be  pun- 
ished but  not  to  be  pitied,  is  a  most  imbecile  calcula- 
tion. Champcenetz  has  failed.  In  seeking  to  be  hated 
he  is  only  despised.  He  takes  lettres  de  cachet  for 
titles  of  glory  i  he  thinks  that  to  be  notorious  is  to  be 


1759.  CHAMPCENETZ.— PELTIER.  373 

renowned.  He  who  does  not  know  how  to  please  is  un- 
wise to  slander  ;  it  is  of  little  avail  to  be  spiteful  if  one 
does  not  know  how  to  write,  and  if  one  goes  to  prison 
one  should  go  at  least  for  good  verses."  Champcenetz 
was  lieutenant  in  the  Gardes  Fran9aises,  but  was  not 
to  hold  his  lieutenancy  much  longer.  He  was  brave 
enough,  and  his  ready  sword  was  time  and  again  at  the 
service  of  Rivarol,  whose  stinging  satire  he  was  more 
willing  to  defend  than  their  author  was. 

Another  journalist  of  the  race  was  Jean  Gabriel  Pel- 
tier, of  Nantes,  who  was  born  in  1758.  He  came  early 
to  Paris.  According  to  his  own  account,  he  received 
his  education  in  the  College  of  Louis  le  Grand,  and  had 
the  misfortune  of  having  some  shirts  stolen  from  him 
by  a  fellow-student  named  Maximilien  Robespierre,  a 
statement  which  it  surely  required  a  rabid  Royalist  to 
believe.  In  Paris,  Peltier  found  a  place  after  his  own 
heart  and  friends  after  his  own  heart,  among  whom 
he  promptly  dissipated  a  very  pretty  patrimony.  His 
tastes  and  inclinations  jumped  with  those  of  Rivarol 
and  Champcenetz ;  he  liked  the  nobles,  liked  to  rub 
shoulders  with  them,  to  wear  their  modes  and  ape  their 
manners  ;  he  became  in  time  more  royalist  than  the 
Royalists  themselves.  He  was  a  brilliant,  audacious, 
unscrupulous  adventurer  of  letters,  a  good  swashbuck- 
ling henchman ;  not  perhaps  quite  the  best  man  to  help 
to  save  a  losing  cause ;  still  a  faithful  free-companion 
enough. 

A  much  better  man  than  Peltier  was  not  at  this  time 
shining  upon  the  salon  where  Rivarol  and  Champcenetz 
and  their  like  glittered.  The  man  who  was  to  be  their 
ally  in  their  desperate  fight  for  the  Old  Order  against 
the  New  Order  was  now  wandering  in  America  and 
dreaming  of  settling  down  there  for  the  remainder  of 


374  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIII. 

his  days.  It  would  have  been  much  better  for  unhappy 
Suleau  if  he  had  done  so  instead  of  coming  home  to 
fight  a  lost  fight  and  perish  by  a  woman's  hand  for  an 
unworthy  epigram.  Louis  Fran9ois  Suleau  was  young, 
like  the  others.  He  was  born  in  1757  ;  he  too  was  edu- 
cated at  the  College  of  Louis  le  Grand,  where  he  had  a 
great  friend  in  a  fellow-student  named  Camille  Desmou- 
lins ;  he  had  served  in  the  army  and  got  tired  of  it ;  he 
had  served  the  law  and  known  a  lawyer  named  Danton, 
and  got  tired  of  the  law  in  its  turn,  and  had  set  off  in 
1787  for  America.  He  will  return  in  the  late  July  of 
this  year  1789  to  a  changed  world  and  to  his  fate. 

A  somewhat  dai'ker  and  more  dangerous  spirit  is  the 
Count  Alexandre  de  Tilly,  the  beau  Tilly,  whose  me- 
moirs, as  sparkling  and  as  venomous  as  a  poisoned  wine, 
have  left  behind  so  curious  a  representation  of  the  age 
in  which  he  lived.  Tilly  was  an  Osric  doubled  with 
lago  ;  a  dandy  and  a  rake,  he  was  also  something  of  the 
assassin;  his  beauty,  his  wit,  and  his  malignant  malice 
gave  him  a  little  of  the  character  of  a  fallen  angel. 
All  his  comprehensive  love  for  women,  all  the  passion- 
ate adoration  that  women  paid  to  him,  all  the  loves  he 
inspired  and  the  hates  he  felt,  all  the  witty  things  he 
said — and  some  of  them  are  incomparably  witty — all 
the  unconquerable  envy,  hatred,  malice,  and  all  un char- 
itableness of  his  nature,  all  the  impertinence  and  the 
treachery  and  the  cruelty  were  to  end  very  dismally 
and  very  shamefully  in  desperate  self-slaughter  in  the 
years  to  come.  For  the  moment  he  was  one  of  the 
brightest  of  the  courtly  satellites,  one  of  the  strongest 
too  ;  if  there  had  been  more  men  like  Tilly -and  another 
king,  the  royalty  might  have  had  a  different  fate.  For 
a  time  he  was  a  friend  of  Rivarol's,  and  with  him  and 
his  allies  was  to  fight  a  stout  fight  for  the  monarchy 


1764-1816.  MADAME  NECKER.  375 

with  rapier-like  pen.     But  the  "Acts  of  the  Apostles  " 
are  not  yet. 

High  constitutionalism,  high  finance,  high  philosophy, 
high  diplomacy,  found  their  home  in  the  salon  of  Ma- 
dame Necker.  Since  the  old  days  when  Madame  Neck- 
er's  salon  first  became  a  centre  to  be  shone  upon  by 
Grimm's  rouged  ambitious  face,  to  be  longed  for  by  Ga- 
liani  in  his  distant  desert  of  fifty  thousand  Neapolitans, 
to  echo  to  the  sighs  of  D'Alembert  for  Mademoiselle  de 
1'Espinasse,  and  to  catch  the  waning  rays  of  Buffon's 
glory,  Madame  Necker  had  found  a  new  ally  in  making 
her  salon  attractive.  That  new  ally  was  her  brilliant  ugly 
daughter,  who  had  married  a  Swedish  ambassador  when 
she  might  have  married  Pitt,  and  who  was  watching  the 
world  with  her  keen  eyes,  and  meditating  literary  im- 
mortality in  her  quick  brain.  To  the  Necker  salon 
came  all  the  distinguished  people  who  put  their  faith  in 
Necker,  and  whose  devotion  to  the  court  meant  devotion 
to  the  king  and  hostility  to  the  queen,  or,  at  least,  to 
the  Polignac  section,  which  was  supposed  to  sway  the 
queen.  It  was  a  ministerialist  salon,  a  salon  that  looked 
with  suspicion  alike  upon  the  rising  democratic  spirit 
and  upon  the  extreme  feudalism  of  the  Old  Order  as  it 
was  represented  by  the  queen's  party.  The  most  brill- 
iant and  conspicuous  of  the  new  men  who  were  now 
thronging  to  Paris  did  not  swell  the  crowd  at  Madame 
Necker's  receptions.  The  men  whom  Burke  would  have 
called  men  of  light  and  leading  went  elsewhere  ;  a 
Sieves,  whom  we  shall  meet  with  presently,  a  Clermont- 
Tonnerre,  whom  we  shall  also  meet  with,  were  the  most 
remarkable  lions  of  the  salon  where  Marmontel  had 
glittered  and  Galiani  played  Harlequin  Machiavelli,and 
St.  Lambert  slightly  chilled  the  company  with  his  icy 
exquisite  politeness. 


37Q  THE   FRENCH    REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIII. 

A  very  different  salon  from  any  of  these,  and  yet  a 
very  important  salon  in  its  way,  was  that  of  a  very 
beautiful  lady  of  the  lightest  of  light  reputations  who 
came  from  Liege  and  set  up  her  staff  in  Paris.  The- 
roigne  de  Mericourt  was  the  daughter  of  a  rich  farmer; 
she  had  been  betrayed  and  abandoned,  such  was  her 
story,  by  a  noble;  she  gravitated  to  London  and  to  Paris, 
where  she  was  ambitious  of  playing  the  part,  not  of  a 
vulgar  courtesan,  but  of  a  revolutionary  Aspasia,  a  het- 
aira  of  the  type  that  was  to  find  its  Pericles  among  the 
enthusiasts  of  the  New  Order.  She  was  very  beautiful, 
she  was  very  clever;  her  house  came  to  be  the  centre 
for  all  the  men  of  the  most  advanced  ideas.  Here  came 
men  who  were  yet  to  be  famous — Petion,  Romme,  Sieves, 
Target,  Maximilien  Robespierre,  Populus,  as  Popule  was 
called,  Populus  who  was  regarded  by  many  as  the  real 
Pericles  of  Theroigne's  Aspasia.  At  this  moment  the 
star  of  her  vexed  and  unhappy  destiny  was  shining  very 
brightly.  The  betrayed  farmer's  daughter  Anne  Jo- 
sephe  Terwagne  was  the  idol  of  advanced  Paris,  a  rev- 
olutionary goddess  before  the  days  of  revolutionary 
goddesses. 

Among  the  smaller  salons  were  that  of  Madame  Ilel- 
vetius — she  with  whom  Turgot  had  played  at  battledore 
and  shuttlecock — frequented  by  the  leading  philosophers 
and  men  of  science;  the  revolutionary  salons  of  Madame 
Dauberval,  the  dancer's  wife,  and  of  Madame  d'Angi- 
viller,  where  a  ridiculous,  bedizened  old  woman  played 
at  youth;  the  salon  of  the  Countess  de  Tesse,  who  is  to 
be  enthusiastic  about  Bailly,  and  many  another  of  less 
note  and  scant  importance,  where  the  new  ideas  were 
assiduously  discussed,  fiercely  championed,  or  bitterly 
arraigned.  Gouverneur  Morris  describes  Madame  de 
Tesse  as  a  Republican  of  the  first  feather,  "  a  very  sen- 


1746-1830.  MADAME   DE    GEXLIS.  377 

sible  woman,"  who  has  "  formed  her  ideas  of  govern- 
ment in  a  manner  not  suited,  I  think,  either  to  the  sit- 
uation, the  circumstances,  or  the  disposition  of  France, 
and  there  are  many  such." 

Very  unlike  the  salon  of  the  wild  Theroigne  was  that 
in  which  Madame  de  Genlis  received  the  more  respecta- 
ble of  the  queer  crowd  which  composed  the  Duke  d'Or- 
leans'  party.  As  the  lady  of  honor  to  the  Duchesse  de 
Chartres,  Equality  Orleans'  daughter-in-law,  she  acted 
in  some  measure  as  hostess  in  the  Palais  Royal.  Her 
daughter  Pamela  was  there  to  add  the  charm  of  her 

O 

rare  beauty,  that  beauty  which  a  few  years  later  was  to 
captivate  a  young  Irish  gentleman,  the  "gallant  and 
seditious  Geraldine"  Lord  Edward  Fitzgerald,  who  loved 
her,  so  the  legend  goes,  less  for  herself  than  for  the  fact 
that  her  beauty  reminded  him  of  one  whom  he  had 
adored  too  wildly,  the  beautiful  wife  of  Richard  Brins- 
ley  Sheridan.  But  in  these  days  the  beautiful  Pamela 
was  a  slender  stripling  of  a  girl,  and  the  young  Irish 
gentleman  was  far  away.  To  Madame  de  Genlis's  salon 
came  Choderlos  de  Laclos.  Most  able  among  profligate 
penmen,  he  had  come  into  the  world  at  Amiens  in  1741, 
chiefly,  as  it  would  seem,  to  be  of  service  to  a  Duke 
d'Orleans  who  needed  such  service  badly,  and  to  write 
an  obscene  book.  The  book  is  still  dimly  remembered 
by  the  lovers  of  that  class  of  literature ;  Laclos  himself 
is  dimly  remembered,  the  shadow  of  a  name.  Here,  too, 
came  Saint-Huruge,  bull-necked  and  boisterous,  loving 
his  cups  and  the  sound  of  his  loud  voice,  an  immense 
believer  in  himself,  a  brazen  creature,  hollow  and  noisy 
as  brass  is  hollow  and  noisy.  In  these  later  years  Ma- 
dame de  Genlis  had  grown  sourly  prim.  She  was  virtu- 
ous now,  and  heartily  desired  that  there  should  be  no 
more  cakes  and  ale.  Probably  of  all  women  in  the 


378  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 

world  she  liked  Madame  Buffon  least.  So  she  sits  now 
in  that  "blue-room  with  its  golden  beading  and  its  mag- 
nificence of  mirror,"  sour,  austere,  compelling  even  Saint- 
Huruge  to  lower  his  voice,  and  even  Laclos  to  moderate 
his  sallies.  Hers  was  decidedly  the  dismalest  of  all  the 
salons,  but  very  important. 

There  was  another  blue-room  of  a  brighter  kind, 
where  Madame  de  Beauharnais  held  her  little  court. 
Madame  de  Beauharnais  was  no  longer  young ;  she  had 
never  been  very  witty,  but  she  possessed  the  happy  art 
of  wearing  years  gracefully,  and  of  seeming  witty,  which 
is  almost  as  good  as  being  witty.  And  then  she  gave 
such  excellent  dinners.  It  might  almost  have  been  said 
of  her  by  the  uncharitable  that  she  intended  to  found  a 
salon  and  only  succeeded  in  starting  a  restaurant,  for 
certainly  her  dinners  were  the  things  most  immediately 
associated  with  her  name.  There  was  a  queer  atmos- 
phere of  dead  days  forgotten  about  that  little  room  in 
blue  and  silver.  The  ghosts  of  a  former  generation  of 
wits  and  philosophers  and  statesmen  seemed  to  flit  like 
bats  through  its  dim  air.  Rousseau  was  here  in  his  time, 
and  many  another  famous  man  now  quietly  inurned  :  the 
Dorats,  the  Crebillons,  the  Colardeaus — ghosts,  ghosts, 
ghosts.  The  memory  of  Dorat  was  disagreeably  per- 
petuated by  Dorat-Cubieres — most  unadmirable  of  mean 
men,  a  weary  rhymer  of  foolishness,  "  the  delirious  mite 
who  wishes  to  play  the  ant,"  as  Rivarol  kindly  said  of 
him.  He  played  the  host  in  this  salon  and  the  fool,  and 
was  yet  to  play  the  knave  when  his  time  came.  Here 
came  distinguished  strangers;  an  exiled  Prince  de  Gon- 
zague  Castiglione,  whom  we  shall  scarcely  meet  again, 
and  an  atheistic  Prussian  baron  whom  we  shall  certain- 
ly meet  again,  and  come  to  know  more  closely.  For  the 
present  he  was  known  as  Jean  Baptiste  Clootz.  Here, 


1734-1806.  RESTIF   DE   LA   BRETOXNE.  379 

too,  came  Vicq-d'Azir  and  Rabaut  Saint-Etienne,  the 
excellent  high-minded  Protestant  enthusiast,  seeing  no 
shadow  of  the  axe  upon  his  path.  Here  came  Mercier, 
noting  with  his  keen  eyes  the  Paris  that  he  loved,  and 
little  dreaming  what  a  service  he  had  rendered  to  man- 
kind by  his  book.  Here,  too,  came  one  of  the  most  re- 
markable figures  of  a  fading  past,  Restif  de  la  Bretonne. 
Restif  de  la  Bretonne  was  one  of  the  strangest 
figures  that  literary  France  of  the  eighteenth  century 
produced.  That  curious  sloping  forehead  and  long 
nose,  those  thick  lips,  that  retreating  chin,  that  large 
sleepy  eye  with  its  vague  air  of  speculation,  suggest 
more  the  tenth  transmitter  of  a  foolish  face  than  the 
brilliant  and  amazingly  voluminous  novelist  whose 
works  are  so  vivid  a  picture  of  the  France  of  the  Old 
Order.  Compared  to  a  writer  whose  works  occupy 
some  two  hundred  volumes,  the  poor  half-century  of 
volumes  of  Balzac's  fiction  sinks  into  insignificance. 
But  while  Balzac  lives  Restif  de  la  Bretonne  is  forgot- 
ten ;  a  few  bibliophiles  rave  about  him  because  his  books 
are  hard  to  obtain  ;  it  is  said  that  no  one  possesses  a 
complete  set.  A  kind  of  Restifomania,  as  it  has  been 
called,  has  seized  upon  a  few  individuals  who  offer  up 
to  the  memory  of  their  eccentric  genius  an  almost  Buddh- 
istic devotion.  He  has  been  hailed  as  the  French  De- 
foe, but  his  popularity  has  not  endured  like  Defoe's. 
He  has  been  styled  the  Rousseau  of  the  Halles,  and  the 
Rousseau  des  ruisseaus ;  but  while  the  influence  of 
Rousseau  is  as  enormous  almost  as  ever,  the  influence 
of  Restif  is  exercised  over  a  little  handful  of  queer  book- 
worms. Nicholas  Edme  Restif  was  born  in  Burgundy 
in  the  October  of  1734,  the  eldest  son  of  the  second 
marriage  of  a  farmer  who  had  been  a  clerk.  He  was 
brought  up  to  the  life  of  a  peasant,  and  the  knowledge 


390  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIII. 

of  the  Bible.  Before  he  was  fifteen  he  was  educated 
for  a  while  in  Paris  among  the  Jansenists  of  Bicetre. 
In  1751  he  was  apprenticed  to  a  printer  in  Auxerre. 
In  1755  he  came  to  Paris,  which  was  to  be  his  home 
for  the  rest  of  his  life.  In  1767  he  first  essayed  litera- 
ture, and  for  the  rest  of  his  life  he  literally  showered 
books  upon  a  world  that  was  equally  willing  to  welcome 
them  when  they  came,  and  afterwards  most  heartily  to 
forget  them.  He  had  always  enjoyed  astonishing  health, 
which  was  no  doubt  the  great  secret  of  his  alliance  of 
long  life  with  such  indomitable  work.  He  ate  little, 
drank  less ;  his  weakness  was  a  devotion  for  women, 
which  made  his  life  one  long  procession  of  amours,  of 
passions,  of  intrigues  of  all  kinds.  An  unhappy  mar- 
riage darkened  his  life  for  a  season,  but  he  shook  himself 
free  from  the  tie  and  walked  his  amorous  way  after  his 
own  heart.  His  greatest  enthusiasm  was  for  the  dainty 
shoes,  the  dainty  stockings,  the  dainty  feet  and  shapely 
legs  of  women;  about  these  he  raved  assiduously  through 
all  the  interminable  length  of  his  many  books.  But  if 
he  was  a  gallant  he  was  not  a  dandy.  We  can  almost 
see  him  in  his  habit  as  he  lived,  in  the  costume  which 
he  persisted  in  wearing  for  twenty  years — the  old  blue 
coat,  the  heavy  black  mantle,  the  huge  felt  hat.  He 
was  always  indifferent  to  linen  and  the  cares  of  the 
person.  He  had  a  way  when  he  was  working  hard  at 
a  book  of  not  shaving  till  it  was  finished,  which  did  not 
add  to  his  attractions,  but  which  sufficiently  displayed 
his  absolute  and  serene  indifference  to  the  mere  minute- 
nesses of  existence.  In  these  days  of  revolution  in  the 
air  his  spirit  is  all  Republican ;  he  is  one  of  the  stran- 
gest figures  to  whom  it  was  given  to  live  through  the 
more  thrilling  part  of  the  great  drama  that  was  now 
upon  the  eve  of  beginning. 


1757-1832.  THE   LAMETHS.  381 

To  the  salon  of  Madame  de  Broglie,  wife  of  the  young 
Prince  de  Broglie,  came  certain  brilliant,  thoughtful 
young  men  who  had  a  distinguished  part  to  play.  One 
of  them  was  named  Barnave ;  we  shall  meet  with  him 
again.  Here  came  the  two  noble  sons  of  an  ancient 
Picardy  house,  Charles  Malo  de  Lameth,  born  in  1757, 
and  his  brother  Alexandre  Malo  de  Lameth,  who  was 
three  years  younger.  They  had  both  shared  with  La- 
fayette and  Lauzun  and  Boniface  Barrel  Mirabeau  in 
the  honors  of  the  American  campaign;  they  had  both 
been  chosen  by  an  affectionate  province  to  share  in  the 
honors  of  the  States- General ;  they  represented  the  des- 
perate, honorable  attempt  to  unite  loyalty  to  the  mon- 
archy with  advanced  constitutional  ideas.  Here  too 
came  Armand  de  Vignerot,  Duke  d'Aguillon,  son  of  the 
D'Aguillon  of  the  Du  Barry  days,  and  himself  a  gallant 
soldier.  Here  came  the  Vicomte  de  Noailles  and  the 
young  Duke  Mathieu  de  Montmorency,  who  entered  the 
National  Assembly  as  a  youth  of  twenty-two — he  was 
born  in  1767 — who  was  only  a  child  when  he  followed 
Lafayette  to  America,  and  who  was  one  of  the  most 
advanced  of  the  advanced  nobility.  In  consequence  he 
will  soon  share  with  the  Lameths  and  their  like  the 
merciless  hatred  of  the  Royalists  quand  mdme,  such  as 
Tilly  and  the  Rivarol  gang. 

The  salon  of  Julie  Talma,  the  great  actor's  wife,  was  no 
less  political  than  dramatic.  Joseph  Marie  Chenier  was 
as  interested  in  the  events  of  the  day  as  in  his  plays. 
Ducis's  honest  if  queer  admiration  for  Shakespeare, 
whom  he  never  read  in  the  original,  was  allied  with  a  no 
less  honest  interest  in  the  events  of  the  hour.  Ducis  was  a 
Republican  of  a  high  ideal  kind  like  Chenier,  like  another 
frequenter  of  the  Talma  home  whom  we  shall  have  much 
to  do  with  hereafter,  and  whose  name  was  Vergniaud. 


382  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 

One  of  the  queerest  of  all  the  queer  centres  of  Pari- 
sian life  was  dominated  by  an  English  nobleman.  The 
Duke  of  Bedford,  fifth  duke  of  the  name,  was  an  ardent 
sympathizer  with  the  earlier  revolutionists,  held  open 
house  for  them  and  for  the  light  ladies  who  sympathized 
with  them,  Grace  Dalrymple  Elliott,  the  Duke  of  Or- 
leans' mistress,  who  wisely  left  memoirs,  and  Madame 
de  Saint  Amaranthe,  and  the  rest.  He  was  a  man  of 
new  ideas;  he  disliked  the  Duke  of  Dorset,  who  reigned 
at  the  Embassy;  these  two  motives  were  enough  to  tar 
him  on  to  toy  with  revolution.  But  the  strongest  mo- 
tive was  the  first,  which  led  him  a  few  years  later  to 
become  the  leader  of  the  crops  or  shavers,  as  the  Radi- 
cal peers  and  gentlemen  were  called  who  showed  their 
affection  for  advanced  ideas  by  wearing  their  hair  short, 
and  irritated  the  Tories  by  thus  avoiding  the  tax  on 
hair-powder.  The  Marquis  de  Villette  of  infamous  rep- 
utation was  always  a  conspicuous  figure  at  the  Bedford 
entertainments. 

A  much  more  sober  salon  was  that  of  Madame  Panck- 
oucke,  the  wife  of  Panckoucke  the  publisher,  the  Panck- 
oucke  who  shall  yet  apply  for  the  privilege  of  report- 
ing the  debates  of  the  National  Assembly.  Panckoucke 
himself  was  an  enterprising,  ambitious  man,  sprung  from 
an  old  printing  stock  at  Lille.  He  was  born  in  1736  ; 
when  he  was  eighteen  years  old  he  came  to  Paris  to 
make  his  name,  and  he  succeeded.  He  had  a  lucky  in- 
stinct; he  married  a  clever  woman  more  ambitious  than 
himself,  whose  sister  was  married  to  the  Academician 
Suard ;  he  bought  the  Mercure,  the  oldest  paper  in 
France,  and  afterwards  bought  the  Gazette  de  France. 
Such  a  man  naturally  gathered  a  number  of  authors 
about  him,  and  when  the  Revolution  was  dawning,  and 
Madame  Panckoucke  saw  her  way  to  playing  a  part  in 


1736-98.  MALLET-DU-PAN.  383 

politics,  she  was  not  likely  to  want  for  visitors  of  dis- 
tinction. Here  came  La  Harpe,  acrid,  pedantic,  energetic 
classicist,  writer  of  poor  tragedies,  compiler  of  a  por- 
tentous "  Course  of  Literature,"  which  was  not  without 
merit,  a  man  who  in  his  fifty  years  of  life — he  was  born 
in  1739 — had  earned  perhaps  more  hatred  than  usually 
falls  to  the  lot  of  critics.  Here,  too,  came  the  older  and 
less  ill-tempered  critic  Marmontel,  sixty-six  years  of 
age,  with  a  memory  going  back  over  the  brilliant  days 
of  the  Pompadour,  and  the  great  Titanomachia  of  the 
" Encyclopaedia,"  "quorum  pars  parva  fuit."  Both  he 
and  La  Harpe,  belonging  as  they  did  to  the  old  school, 
were  yet  to  outlast  the  fever  heat  of  the  Revolution 
after  seeing  the  world  in  which  they  lived  turned  com- 
pletely topsy-turvy,  after  a  fashion  intolerably  per- 
plexing to  compilers  of  "Elements  de  Litterature," and 
"  Cours  de  Litterature.'5  Here  came  Condorcet,  whom 
we  shall  make  closer  acquaintance  with  at  the  Paris 
elections.  Here  came  Barere,  dreaming  not  of  terror  as 
order  of  the  day,  or  guillotine  Anacreontics,  and  heed- 
less of  a  certain  Zachary  Macaulay,  of  whom  Brissot 
could  have  told  him  somewhat,  and  who  was  yet  in 
eleven  years  to  bear  a  son  who  should  lend  Barere's 
name  a  cruel  immortality.  But  Madame  Panckoucke's 
most  important  guest  was  the  grave,  high-minded,  hon- 
orable Genevese  Mallet-du-Pan.  An  austere  man  of 
forty,  born  in  1749,  he  had  seen  many  things  with  those 
grave,  judicious,  earnest  eyes,  but  nothing  yet  to  pre- 
pare him  for  what  he  was  still  to  see.  His  childhood 
was  passed  in  the  beautiful  little  village  of  Celigny,  on 
the  right  bank  of  the  Lake  of  Geneva,  where  his  father 
was  pastor.  He  studied  and  earned  high  honors  at  the 
College  of  Geneva  which  Calvin  founded ;  for  a  while 
he  studied  the  law.  He  was  fifteen  when  he  entered  the 


384  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIII. 

Geneva  Academy;  when  he  left  the  Academy  at  twenty 
years  of  age  he  plunged  at  once  with  a  strangely  ma- 
tured mind  in  the  political  and  journalistic  life  of  the 
little  Republic.  He  early  earned  the  warm  friendship 
of  Voltaire,  and  no  one  saw  more  of  the  aged  philoso- 
pher in  his  shelter  at  Ferney  than  the  young  Mallet-du- 
Pan.  The  persecutions  inflicted  upon  Linguet  aroused 
the  indignation  of  Mallet-du-Pan  ;  when  Linguet  ap- 
peared at  Ferney,  as  most  people  in  trouble  did,  he 
greatly  attracted  the  young  man,  though  he  greatly  ir- 
ritated Voltaire,  and  in  1777,  under  Linguet's  influence, 
Mallet-du-Pan  went  first  to  London  and  then  to  Brus- 
sels, where  Linguet  decided  to  publish  his  Anmihs 
politiques,  civiles,  et  litteraires  du  Dix-huitieme  Siecle. 
During  Linguet's  imprisonment  in  the  Bastille  Mallet- 
du-Pan  kept  up  a  sequel  to  the  Annales.  When  Lin- 
guet came  out  of  the  Bastille  he  quarrelled  with  Mallet- 
du-Pan,  and  denounced  him  as  an  imitator.  Mallet 
indignantly  and  justly  repudiated  the  charge,  and  car- 
ried on  his  own  paper  under  the  title  of  Mernoires 
historiques,  politiques,  et  litteraires,  sur  TEtat  present 
d  V Europe,  with  the  motto,  "  Nee  temere,  nee  timide." 
In  1782,  when  Geneva  was  torn  by  revolution,  and 
three  armies  thundered  at  her  gates,  Mallet  played  his 
part  in  a  mission  to  General  la  Marmora,  and  in  coun- 
selling prudence  to  his  fellow-citizens.  In  1784  Mallet- 
du-Pan  came  to  Paris.  Panckoucke  had  been  longing 
for  him  since  1778;  now  at  last  he  induced  him  to  edit 
the  political  part  of  the  Mercure,  and  in  Paris  for  the 
five  years  till  1789  he  lived  in  great  quiet  and  seclu- 
sion with  his  family — he  had  married  young — devot- 
ing himself  heart  and  soul  to  his  journalistic  life.  Of 
a  strictly  simple  nature,  brought  up  in  the  austerity  of 
Swiss  life,  he  was  little  attracted  by  the  glitter  of  Paris 


1789.  ELYSEE   LOUSTALOT.  385 

life.  Paris  began,  he  said,  by  astonishing,  it  afterwards 
amused,  then  it  fatigued.  No  higher-minded  man  ever 
gave  his  services  to  journalism ;  no  purer  spirit  devoted 
itself  to  the  Royalist  cause;  if  that  cause  could  have 
counted  on  more  supporters  like  him,  it  would  have 
been  happier. 

A  very  different  type  of  journalist  had  just  come  to 
Paris  in  the  early  part  of  this  year  1789.  This  was 
Elysee  Loustalot,  who  was  born  in  1761  at  Saint-Jean 
d'Angely.  His  family  occupied  an  honorable  place  at 
the  Bar;  it  was  in  accordance  with  the  fitness  of  things 
that  the  young  Loustalot  should  go  to  the  Bar  too. 
Accordingly  he  studied  law  at  the  College  of  Saintes, 
studied  law  at  Bordeaux,  and  became  a  lawyer  there. 
He  got  into  trouble  on  account  of  a  vehement  attack 
he  made  upon  the  administration  of  his  native  town ; 
he  was  suspended  for  six  months  from  the  practice  of 
his  profession  ;  irritated,  he  shook  off  the  dust  of  pro- 
vincial life,  and  came  to  Paris  in  the  beginning  of  1789 
to  follow  the  Paris  Bar.  While  pursuing  his  profes- 
sion he  was  keenly  attracted  by  the  new  political  life 
and  activity  that  was  teeming  around  him,  and  he  was 
ready  enough  when  the  time  came — and  the  time  was 
now  near  at  hand — to  plunge  into  journalism,  and  to 
fight  vigorously  for  the  principles  of  the  Revolution. 
His  extraordinary  energy,  his  unwearying  capacity  for 
work,  his  clear  and  caustic  style,  were  to  make  him  an 
invaluable  supporter  of  the  new  men  and  the  new  ideas 
that  were  coming  into  play. 

The  time  was  not  far  off  when  the  active  life  of  liter- 
ary and  political  Paris  would  be  in  her  clubs,  but  the 
time  was  not  yet.  The  Breton  Club,  germ  of  the  Jaco- 
bins, was  not  yet  formed  ;  the  Cordeliers  was  yet  to  be 
famous.  Still  Paris,  under  the  influence  of  its  Anglo- 
I.— 25 


386  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIIL 

mania,  had  its  clubs — the  "  Societe  des  Amis  des  Noiis," 
which  Brissot  had  founded,  Brissot  who  was  always  be- 
ing fired  by  hissing-hot  pseudo-enthusiasms;  the  Lycee, 
which  was  much  associated  with  Condorcet;  the  Club 
de  Valois,.of  which  that  energetic  American  gentleman, 
Gouverneur  Morris,  was  delighted  to  become  a  member. 
There  were  other  smaller  clubs,  too,  but  the  fierce  club- 
fever  had  not  yet  set  in.  But  none  of  these  were  as  yet 
serious  political  centres.  The  real  political  centre  of 
Paris  was  the  Palais  Royal. 


1789.  OLD   RULES   OBSOLETE.  387 


CHAPTER  XXIV. 

THE    ELECTIONS. 

To  this  excited  and  exciting  Paris  in  the  spring  of 
1789  men  were  tending  from  all  parts  of  France.  From 
north  and  south,  from  east  and  west,  the  high-roads  saw 
a  steady  stream  of  men  rolling  like  the  single  drops  of 
water  to  be  amalgamated  into  the  shining  sea  of  Ver- 
sailles; for  now  the  elections,  the  great  elections  to  the 
States- General,  had  taken  place.  After  an  infinity  of 
speculation  and  discussion,  of  publication  of  pamphlets, 
of  study  of  precedents,  of  consideration  of  time-honored 
formulas  and  propositions  of  radically  new  notions,  the 
States-General  had  somehow  or  other  got  elected.  It 
had  soon  become  clear  that  the  old  rules  were  obsolete, 
exploded,  useless.  On  January  24, 1789,  the  regulation 
was  issued  which  decided  the  way  in  which  the  elec- 
tions should  be  managed  in  that  part  of  France  known 
as  pays  Selection.  The  old  administrative  divisions 
known  as  royal  bailiwicks  in  the  northern  part  of  France, 
and  as  royal  seneschalries  in  the  south,  were  used  as 
electoral  units,  and  a  little  later  the  part  of  France 
known  as  pays  d'etat,  and  which  comprised  such  semi- 
independent  provinces  as  Burgundy,  Brittany,  and  Lan- 
guedoc,  were  also  divided  into  electoral  units.  In  each 
of  these  electoral  units  all  the  nobles,  all  the  clergy,  and 
all  the  electors  of  the  Third  Estate'who  had  been  pre- 
viously elected  in  primary  assemblies  in  town  or  village 
were  to  meet  together  to  choose  their  representatives 
for  the  States-General. 


388  TOE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  On.  XXIV. 

Now  all  this  lay  behind  those  wandering  deputies ;  a 
portion  and  parcel  of  the  dreadful  past.  The  primary 
assemblies  in  the  towns  and  villages  had  got  through 
their  difficult  and  complex  method  of  choosing  the  elec- 
tors, who  were  in  their  turn  to  elect  their  deputies  at 
the  large  assemblies.  The  large  assemblies  in  their  turn 
had  met  and  chosen  their  deputies,  and  those  deputies 
were  now  speeding  as  swiftly  as  might  be  along  all  the 
roads  of  France  to  Versailles.  They  had  not  come  to 
pass,  however,  without  an  immense  deal  of  friction,  and 
sometimes  more  than  friction.  All  manner  of  jealousies 
and  rivalries  agitated  the  bailiwicks ;  all  kinds  of  mis- 
takes were  made,  leading  to  the  issue  of  supplementary 
regulations ;  all  kinds  of  quarrels,  disputes,  bickerings 
rent  the  civic  and  the  country  air.  The  old  nobility  did 
not  always  get  on  very  well  with  the  new  nobility, 
proud  of  their  fire-new  brand  of  honor.  The  upper 
and  the  lower  clergy  were  not  in  cordial  union,  natu- 
rally enough.  Again  and  again  the  orders  fought  among 
themselves  and  fell  asunder.  In  some  cases  the  nobility 
took  no  part  in  the  elections,  in  others  they  protested 
against  their  results.  In  Brittany  they  refused  to  elect 
any  deputies  at  all.  The  Third  Estate  all  over  the  coun- 
try were  fortunate  in  having  the  good  example  and  the 
good  advice  of  Dauphine.  The  wise  men  of  Grenoble, 
with  Mounier  at  their  head,  guided,  advised,  directed, 
encouraged  the  electorate  of  the  Third  Estate  with  mar- 
vellous prudence  and  tact.  It  is  impossible  to  over- 
estimate the  services  Mounier  and  his  friends  rendered 
to  their  cause  at  this  difficult  and  perplexing  crisis. 

The  legend  of  the  imprisoned  Titan  who  only  waits 
the  magic  watchword  to  shake  aside  the  chains  that 
bind  him,  the  mountains  that  are  piled  upon  his  breast, 
found  for  the  first  time  its  parallel  in  history.  The 


1789.  NEW  VITAL   FORCES.  389 

French  people  played  the  part  of  the  prisoned  Titan; 
the  magic  words  States-General  were  the  new  open  ses- 
ame that  set  the  Titan  free.  It  is  unhappily  the  vice  of 
Titans  to  play  sad  pranks  with  their  newly  found  lib- 
erty, pranks  that  a  respectable  Swiss  Protestant  banker 
could  not  dream  of,  much  less  dread.  Enfranchise  the 
people  as  much  as  you  please,  Necker  can  always  con- 
trol, Necker  can  always  guide — such  were  the  confident 
convictions  of  Necker  the  Man,  such  were  the  confident 
assurances  of  Necker  the  Minister.  So  the  work  went 
on,  and  no  one  felt  afraid.  All  over  France  there  was 
a  great  throbbing  of  new  life,  the  quickening  experi- 
ence of  new  vital  forces.  The  new  privileges  were  im- 
mense. Everybody  might  vote,  everybody  who  had  a 
plaint  to  make  might  freely  make  it  heard.  Town  and 
country,  city  and  hamlet,  all  alike  were  equal  as  regards 
the  new  assembly.  Never  was  so  desperate  an  experi- 
ment attempted  before.  The  bulk  of  a  nation  that  had 
lain  for  long  generations  insulted  and  ignored,  the  pa- 
tient victim  of  wellnigh  intolerable  abuses,  was  sud- 
denly intrusted  with  the  rights  and  privileges  of  free 
men.  The  question  was  what  these  free  men  would 
do  with  these  rights  and  privileges,  and  that  was  just 
the  question  which  nobody  could  presume  to  answer, 
though  everybody  made  bold  to  hope  after  his  own 
fashion. 

It  is  said  that  five  millions  of  men  took  part  in  the 
elections.  Five  millions  of  men,  of  whom  the  great  part 
could  not  write,  were  summoned  to  play  their  parts  as 
citizens  and  choose  their  representatives.  The  nobles 
fondly  imagined  that  the  flock  would  follow  its  old  shep- 
herds of  the  Church,  and  of  the  State,  and  prove  a  suf- 
ficiently submissive  instrument  in  the  elections  of  dele- 
gates agreeable  to  the  Old  Order.  The  Old  Order  was 


390  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIV. 

decisively  disappointed.  The  untrained  masses  showed 
an  astonishing  alacrity  to  avail  themselves  of  the  unex- 
pected opportunity  offered  to  them.  They  did  not  know 
their  strength,  but  they  were  dimly,  vaguely  conscious 
of  it,  and  they  bowed  to  their  old  lords  no  longer.  In 
every  part  of  France  men  flocked  to  the  elections.  In 
every  part  of  France  men  put  pens  to  paper,  for  the  draw- 
ing up  of  "  cahiers,"  in  which  the  national  wrongs  were 
for  the  first  time  recorded,  and  recorded  with  striking 
uniformity.  France  was  waking  up  with  a  vengeance ; 
even  the  privileged  orders  were  not  free  from  the  new 
democratic  spirit.  There  were  children  of  the  Church, 
two  hundred  and  more  of  the  smaller  clergy,  who  were 
in  some  degree  inspired  with  the  new  ideas,  who  were 
hostile  to  their  spiritual  heads  very  much  as  the  peasant- 
ry were  hostile  to  their  temporal  heads,  and  the  elections 
brought  some  of  this  democratic  leaven  into  the  lump 
of  the  Second  Estate. 

But  of  all  the  elections  that  sent  deputies  to  the  States- 
General,  by  far  the  most  important  were  the  Paris  elec- 
tions. The  sixteen  quarters  of  the  city  were  divided 
into  sixty  electoral  districts.  To  Paris  had  been  allotted 
no  less  than  forty  deputies — ten  from  the  nobility,  ten 
from  the  clergy,  and  twenty  deputies  of  the  Third  Es- 
tate, in  accordance  with  the  principle  that  had  been 
decided  upon  that  the  Third  Estate  was  to  be  represent- 
ed by  as  many  representatives  as  the  two  other  orders 
put  together.  The  Paris  elections  began  much  later 
than  any  of  the  others,  and  most  of  the  deputies  from 
the  other  parts  of  France  had  actually  arrived  in  Paris 
or  Versailles,  and  were  witnesses  of  the  great  election 
which  was  in  some  sense  the  key-stone  of  the  whole  busi- 
ness. The  nobility  on  the  whole  were  strongly  liberal. 
Their  ten  deputies  included  the  Count  de  Clermont-Ton- 


1758-98.  ADRIEN   DUPORT.  391 

nerre,  the  Duke  de  La  Rochefoucauld,  Count  de  Lally- 
Tollendal,  Adrien  Duport,  and  the  Marquis  of  Montes- 
quieu. Clerraont-Tonnerre  was  a  gallant  cavalry  colonel, 
forty-two  years  old,  and  exceedingly  popular  with  the 
Constitutionalists  on  account  of  his  liberal  ideas.  His 
face  was  singularly  striking,  even  handsome  in  an  impos- 
ing, severe  kind  of  way.  The  sharp,  straight  slope  of  the 
forehead  continued  along  the  nose,  the  long  upper  lip 
and  slightly  protruding  lower  lip,  the  advanced  and 
rounded  chin,  the  high  arched  eyebrows  and  deeply  set 
eyes  with  a  certain  menacing  sternness  in  their  regard, 
seem  the  appropriate  facial  symbols  of  the  calm  and 
lofty  eloquence  he  had  so  readily  at  command. 

Lally-Tollendal  was  a  gallant  captain  of  Cuirassiers, 
the  devoted  son  of  an  unhappy  father,  whose  unjust 
sentence  he  had  succeeded  in  reversing  in  spite  of  the 
opposition  of  another  Paris  deputy,  D'Epremesnil,  neph- 
ew of  Dupleix  and  inheritor  of  his  hate.  Adrien  Du- 
port was  the  Duke  d'Orleans'  right-hand  man,  aspiring 
to  success  through  the  success  of  his  chief,  a  councillor 
in  the  Paris  Parliament,  with  a  vast  ambition  and  a  gen- 
ius for  intrigue.  He  was  now  about  thirty  years  of 
age.  Duport's  influence  was  very  great  in  the  country. 
He  had  correspondents  in  every  part  of  the  kingdom, 
who  kept  him  in  close  touch  with  the  progress  of  opin- 
ion, and  who  were  the  means  of  extending  his  influence. 
His  house  in  Paris  was  a  kind  of  Cave  of  Adullam,  to 
which  all  who  were  discontented,  and  all  who  were  in 
distress  and  all  who  were  in  debt  were  quite  welcome 
to  repair  so  long  as  they  permitted  Adrien  Duport  to 
make  himself  a  captain  over  them.  Here  came  all  the 
young  ambitious  lawyers  of  advanced  opinions  ;  here 
came  the  liberal  nobility  ;  here  came  the  subtle  friend 
of  Madame  de  Flahaut,  Talleyrand,  Perigord,  bishop  of 


392  THE  FRENCH  REVOLTJTION.  CH.  XXIV. 

Autun  ;  here  sometimes  came  a  greater  man  than  any 
or  all  of  these  whose  name  was  Mirabeau.  Duport 
played  his  game  well.  He  was  ambitious  ;  he  saw  in 
himself  an  excellent  prime  -  minister  to  some  .puppet 
king,  some  roi  faineant  such  as  the  Duke  of  Orleans 
might  easily  be  made  under  his  skilful  manipulation. 
That  rounded  face,  with  its  queerly  compressed  lips,  its 
large  sleepy-looking  eyes  with  lowered  lids,  its  spacious 
forehead  and  prominently  marked  eyebrows,  has  on  it  an 
air  of  quizzically  smiling  at  the  follies  of  mankind,  and 
dutifully  suppressing  the  smile.  Certainly  a  man  who 
aspired  to  greatness  by  the  aid  of  Equality  Orleans  had 
every  reason  to  smile  at  mankind. 

It  was  considered  somewhat  surprising  that  two  mem- 
bers of  the  primary  assembly  of  the  nobility  who  helped 
to  draw  up  its  cahier  were  not  chosen  either  as  depu- 
ties or  as  the  supplemental  deputies,  who  were  in  all 
cases  chosen  to  be  in  readiness  in  case  any  accident 
should  prevent  any  of  the  elected  deputies  from  fulfill- 
ing their  functions.  The  two  men  thus  omitted  were 
Choderlos  de  Laclos  and  Condorcet.  No  one  except 
the  members  of  the  Orleans  faction  could  regret  the  ab- 
sence of  Laclos  from  the  assembly.  All  parties  might 
well  have  considered  the  presence  of  Condorcet  an  ad- 
vantage. Still  a  comparatively  young  man  —  he  was 
only  in  his  forty-sixth  year — he  was  already  one  of  the 
most  distinguished  scientific  men  in  France,  and  his 
name  was  the  link  between  the  thinkers  of  the  Encyclo- 
paedic age  and  the  radical  thinkers  of  the  New  Order. 
The  admirer  of  Voltaire,  the  intimate  friend  of  D'Alem- 
bert,  the  disciple,  the  friend,  and  the  biographer  of  Tur- 
got,  the  victor  over  Bailly  at  the  Academy  of  1782, 
Marie  Jean  Antoine  Nicolas  de  Caritat,  Marquis  of 
Condorcet,  would  certainly  have  added  a  lustre  to  the 


1748-94.  CONDOtlCET.  393 

brilliant  assembly  of  men  into  whose  hands  the  task  of 
regenerating  France  was  given. 

Condorcet  was  a  liberal  of  the  truest  type,  the  advo- 
cate of  all  the  oppressed.  There  was  no  more  zealous 
advocate  of  the  cause  of  the  blacks.  The  young  Lally- 
Tollendal,  striving  to  redeem  a  father's  name,  found  no 
firmer  friend  and  helper  than  he.  Injustice  everywhere 
found  in  Condorcet  a  stanch  opponent.  That  wide  in- 
quiring eye,  that  high  and  curiously  domed  forehead, 
the  large  nose  of  Roman  curve,  the  prominent  lips  and 
firm,  forward  chin,  went  to  compose  a  face  in  which 
an  air  of  extreme  gentleness  and  good-nature  masked 
an  ardent,  impulsive  nature.  His  tall,  slightly  stooped 
form,  his  huge  head,  his  massive  shoulders,  made  him 
always  a  conspicuous  figure,  and  contrasted  somewhat 
oddly  with  his  usual  shyness,  even  timidity  of  man- 
ner— a  shyness  and  timidity  that  only  quitted  him  with- 
in the  narrow  circle  of  a  few  intimate  and  dear  friends. 
D'Alembert  called  him  a  volcano  covered  with  snow. 
Mademoiselle  de  Lespinasse  said  that  most  people  look- 
ing at  him  would  think  him  rather  a  worthy  man  than 
a  wise  man.  He  had  none  of  the  belligerent  fierceness 
which  characterized  so  many  of  the  philosophers,  and  no 
man  was  ever  more  ready  to  admit  himself  in  the  wrong 
when  he  believed  himself  to  be  in  the  wrong.  No  sweet- 
er spirit  adorned  the  last  century.  One  critic  described 
him  as  a  mad  sheep.  Madame  Roland  illustrated  the 
relation  of  Condorcet's  mind  to  his  body  by  saying  that 
it  was  a  subtle  essence  soaked  in  cotton.  His  early  ed- 
ucation was  curious  enough.  His  father  was  a  cavalry 
officer  who  died  when  his  son  was  three  years  old. 
Most  of  the  child's  relatives  would  have  liked  to  see  him 
become  in  his  turn  a  stout  man-at-arms,  as  his  father  had 
been  before  him,  and  were  sufficiently  disappointed  at 


394  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIV. 

his  becoming  a  mere  economist  and  philosopher.  But 
his  mother's  treatment  was  hardly  of  a  kind  to  train  him 
either  as  a  good  soldier  or  philosopher.  She  dedicated 
him  to  the  Holy  Virgin,  and  for  eight  years  made  him 
wear  the  dress  of  a  little  girl,  as  a  sort  of  shield  against 
the  evils  of  the  world.  Achilles  in  Scyros  seems  hardly 
stranger  to  us  than  the  little  Condorcet  going  about  in 
girl's  clothes.  Who  shall  say  how  profound  an  influ- 
ence this  extraordinary  experience  may  have  had  upon 
the  child  to  whom  a  little  later  the  Jesuits  were  to  im- 
part so  profound  a  mathematical  knowledge  !  The  boy 
in  girl's  clothes,  the  pupil  of  the  Jesuits,  grew  up  an 
impassioned  mathematician,  but  also  an  ardent  politi- 
cian, eager  in  a  hot-headed,  uncompromising  way  for  the 
bettering  of  the  world.  His  resolves  were  more  impet- 
uous than  strong.  He  was  little  fitted  for  that  golden 
mean  in  life  upon  which  Aristotle  insists.  The  more 
we  read  his  writings,  the  more  we  study  his  life,  the 
more  we  understand,  even  while  we  refuse  to  agree  with, 
that  "  mad  sheep  "  criticism.  For  what  he  believed  to 
be  right  he  contended  with  a  passion  which  was  the 
sign  rather  of  sti'ong  emotions  than  of  the  strong  capac- 
ity to  lead.  With  all  the  most  honorable  ambitions  of 
a  statesman  he  lacked  the  essential  capacity  of  a  success- 
ful statesmanship,  the  capacity  for  seeing  how  much  of 
a  desirable  work  can  be  accomplished  at  a  certain  time, 
and  of  appreciating  with  a  fine  infallibility  the  exact 
time  in  which  the  desired  work  can  best  be  done.  He 
played  his  part  in  forming  the  Revolution  ;  he  was  one 
of  the  many  gallantly  ambitious  Frankensteins  who 
found  their  creation  too  much  for  them. 

The  Pai'isian  clergy  displayed  none  of  the  liberalism 
of  the  nobility.  Their  ten  deputies  were  all  strongly 
conservative;  their  leader,  Antoine  Leclerc  de  Juigne, 


1789.  THE  PARIS  ELECTIONS.  3Q5 

Archbishop  of  Paris,  especially.  The  archbishop  was  an 
excellent  good  man,  charitable,  well  esteemed ;  utterly 
out  of  sympathy,  however,  with  the  advanced  political 
opinions  of  the  hour.  It  will  take  the  stones  of  an  in- 
furiated populace  to  temper  his  hot  conservatism  by- 
and-by,  and  to  make  his  pride  bend  to  the  demands  of 
public  opinion.  The  real  interest  of  the  elections,  how- 
ever, centred  in  the  Third  Estate. 

There  was  trouble  in  Paris.  The  weak  king,  oscillat- 
ing between  Necker  and  the  court,  between  the  rising 
democracy  and  an  imperious  consort,  prompted  by  an 
ambitious  Polignac,  was  making  some  desperate  efforts 
to  shackle  his  liberated  Titan.  By  delay  of  elections, 
by  postponement  of  the  opening  of  the  States-General, 
by  such  clumsy  devices  the  poor  king  strove  to  shuffle 
aside  the  inevitable,  and  to  pack  cards  with  fortune. 
In  Paris  especially,  Paris,  where  the  popular  feeling  was 
most  alert  and  most  intelligent,  the  court  resorted  to  its 
rashest  measures.  The  Paris  elections  were  not  fixed 
until  the  very  eve  of  the  opening  of  the  States-General. 
By  this  juggle  the  court  hoped  to  keep  the  Paris  dep- 
uties out  of  the  way  until  the  essential  preliminaries 
might  be  arranged  which  were  to  assure  to  the  privi- 
leged orders  the  majority  of  the  Third  Estate.  More- 
over, the  conditions  of  election  were  by  a  special  decree 
made  more  severe  in  Paris  than  in  any  other  part  of  the 
kingdom.  Only  those  who  paid  six  livres  of  impost, 
instead  of  those  who  paid  hardly  any  impost  at  all, 
were  allowed  to  vote.  To  overawe  the  electors  thus 
minimized  the  streets  were  filled  with  troops,  the  place 
of  election  surrounded  by  soldiers ;  all  that  the  display 
of  force  could  do  was  done  to  bring  the  electors  of 
Paris  to  appreciate  their  position  and  to  submit.  The 
electors  did  appreciate  their  position  rightly,  and  they 


396  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XXIV. 

did  not  submit.  They  started  off  by  declining  to  ac- 
cept the  presidents  proposed  for  them  in  the  royal  name. 
Sixty  presidents  had  been  thus  proposed  for  the  sixty 
districts  of  Paris,  and  out  of  these  sixty  only  three  were 
accepted,  and  then  only  on  the  express  understanding 
that  they  must  consider  themselves  as  duly  elected  by 
the  will  of  the  people,  and  not  as  the  nominees  of  the 
court.  On  April  21st  the  vai'ious  districts  chose  their 
representatives  for  the  general  assembly  of  the  Third 
Estate  of  Paris.  On  April  26th  the  general  assembly 
of  the  Third  Estate  met  separately,  after  the  nobles  and 
the  clergy  had  refused  to  join  with  them,  elected  Tar- 
get for  their  president,  Camus  for  second  president, 
Sylvain  Bailly  for  secretary,  and  Dr.  Guillotin  as  assist- 
ant secretary.  Gui  Jean  Baptiste  Target  was  born  in 
Paris  in  1733.  He  was  a  member  of  the  Academy;  he 
was  the  foremost  leader  of  the  Paris  Bar.  lie  had  al- 
ways before  his  eyes  as  an  ideal  the  British  Constitu- 
tion, a  monarchy  tempered  by  parliamentary  govern- 
ment. An  air  of  humorous  surprise  throned  upon  his 
large  and  heavy  face,  to  which  a  slight  obliquity  of  the 
eyes  appeared  to  give  an  oddness  of  expression.  He 
was,  according  to  the  testimony  of  his  colleague  Bailly, 
whom  we  shall  meet  with  and  estimate  later,  a  man  of 
flawless  probity,  of  infinite  political  learning,  of  rare 
memory,  eloquent  and  logical,  of  profound  and  critical 
judgment.  Armand  Gaston  Camus,  his  colleague,  was, 
like  him,  a  Parisian  ;  he  was  born  in  Paris  in  1740,  and 
up  to  this  time  he  was  chiefly  remarkable  for  his  trans- 
lation of  Aristotle's  "  History  of  Animals,"  which  had 
earned  him  a  place  in  the  Academy  of  Inscriptions. 
He  was  a  jovial -looking  man,  with  an  air  of  roguish 
sensuality. 

Assistant-secretary  Guillotin  we  shall  meet  with  again 


1738-1814.  DR.  GUILLOTIN.  397 

and  again.  At  present  he  was  simply  a  successful  doc- 
tor, fifty-one  years  of  age,  with  a  somewhat  skull-like 
face,  large  mouth,  and  smiling  eyes.  Questions  of  hy- 
giene, questions  of  humanity  occupied  his  mind  even 
more  than  questions  of  politics.  But  he  was  a  keen 
politician  too,  no  doubt  acquainted  with  the  rising  of 
the  English  people  against  their  king,  Charles  I.,  and 
pained,  probably,  by  the  blundering  method  of  decapi- 
tation employed.  Could  there  not  be  some  better  way  ? 
he  thought,  with  no  idea  of  what  that  better  way  was. 
We  have  seen  that  the  fate  of  Charles  I.  appears  to 
have  made  a  profound  impression  upon  the  French 
mind.  We  have  seen  what  Turgot  wrote  to  Louis  XVI. 
Arthur  Young  speaks  of  the  opinion  some  Frenchman 
of  his  acquaintance  passed  upon  that  act.  This  French- 
man, speaking  for  himself  and  his  countrymen,  said 
that  the  French  had  too  "profound  a  respect  for  their 
monarchy  to  allow  such  a  crime  ever  to  become  possible 
in  France.  Yet  the  example  was  always  there,  ominous 
and  disquieting.  We  read  that  Madame  du  Barry  was 
at  great  pains  to  obtain  a  portrait  of  Charles  I.,  and  that 
she  was  wont  to  stimulate  the  flagging  zeal  of  Louis  the 
Well -beloved  against  his  Parliaments  by  pointing  to 
this  portrait,  and  warning  him  of  what  he  might  expect 
if  he  did  not  keep  turbulent  forces  well  in  check.  So, 
too,  in  much  the  same  manner  the  Count  d'Artois  about 
this  time  of  the  States-General  presented  Louis  XVI. 
with  a  picture  of  Charles  I.,  as  a  warning  to  him  of 
what  happened  to  kings  who  conceded  too  much  to 
their  subjects.  How  portentous  the  warning  was  stu- 
pid D'Artois  and  blundering  Louis  had  no  idea.  Guil- 
lotin  was  the  man  to  drive  the  warning  home. 


398  TI1E  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXV. 


CHAPTER  XXV. 

THE     SPUING     OF    '89. 

PARIS  had  seldom  known  a  harder,  a  crueler  winter 
than  that  of  1788-89.  When  the  year  began,  the  ther- 
mometer registered  eighteen  degrees  below  the  freez- 
ing-point. It  had  been  freezing  for  thirty -six  days, 
ever  since  November  24th,  and  the  suffering  was  in- 
tense. The  Seine  had  begun  to  freeze  on  November 
26th,  and  the  cold  showed  no  signs  of  diminishing. 
It  was  not  so  bad  for  the  wealthy,  who,  cloaked  in 
furs,  skimmed  along  the  frozen  boulevards  in  fantastic 
sleighs,  capriciously  delighted  with  the  new  toys  that 
Nature  allowed  them  to  sport  with.  But  to  the  needy 
and  the  really  poor  the  winter  was  one  long  agony. 
People  died  of  cold  in  the  streets;  the  hospitals  over- 
flowed with  luckless  wretches — men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren— struck  down  by  the  merciless  intensity  of  cold. 

Lalande,  who  had  startled  Paris  before  by  a  threat- 
ened comet,  predicted  that  the  cold  would  endure,  and 
his  prophecy  proved  correct  this  time.  Until  January 
13th  there  was  no  thaw,  and  then,  though  there  was  a 
slight  frost  on  the  16th,  the  bitterness  of  the  cold  began 
to  break,  and  was  succeeded  by  pitiless,  endless  torrents 
of  rain.  The  horrors  of  that  wild  winter  are  difficult 
to  appreciate.  The  suffering  was  appalling,  the  mor- 
tality great.  Charitable  people  like  Langrier  de  Beau- 
recueil,  cure  of  Sainte-Marguerite,  like  Monseigneur  de 
Juigne,  organized  dispensations  of  food  and  fire  in  the 


1789.  A  MOMENTOUS  JANUARY.  399 

form  of  soup  and  charcoal,  but  there  was  not  enough 
soup  to  feed  all  the  starving  mouths,  nor  charcoal  to 
warm  the  pinched  bodies.  In  some  cases  the  poor 
wretches  to  whom  the  burning  charcoal  was  given  were 
found  in  their  miserable  slums  dead,  asphyxiated  by  the 
subtle  fumes  over  which  they  had  cowered  in  their 
aching  passion  for  warmth.  The  Hospice  de  la  Garde 
de  Paris  opened  its  doors  to  the  poor  who  passed  by, 
that  they  might  come  in  and  warm  themselves  at  its 
fires  on  their  way. 

From  the  dawn  of  the  year  Paris  was  as  warm  with 
political  excitement  as  it  was  cold  with  climate.  Day 
by  day  thrilling  news  came  pouring  in  from  the  prov- 
inces. Now  it  was  the  Dauphine  elections  begun  be- 
fore the  solemn  sanction  of  the  State  had  been  given  in 
its  published  regulation.  Now  it  was  riots  in  Nantes. 
Now  it  was  the  imbecile  action  of  the  Breton  nobles. 
Now  it  was  the  controversies  in  Franche  Comte  be- 
tween the  liberal  and  anti-liberal  nobility.  Now  it  was 
the  dissensions  and  disturbances  in  Rennes.  Now  it 
was  the  protest  of  the  nobility  of  Toulouse  against  the 
States  of  Languedoc.  Now.  it  was  the  meeting  of  the 
three  orders  in  Lorraine,  and  De  Custine's  declaration 
that  the  order  of  the  Third  Estate  constituted  the  na- 
tion. Now  it  was  the  Roussillon  nobility  renouncing 
their  pecuniary  privileges.  Now  it  was  the  discord  in 
Provence,  and  the  name  of  Mirabeau  blown  about  on 
Provengal  winds.  Now  it  was  the  orders  of  Chateau- 
roux  and  of  Languedoc  renouncing  their  pecuniary 
privileges.  Never  had  a  more  momentous  January 
passed  over  Parisian  heads.  Every  day  brought  fresh 
news  from  the  provinces,  and  with  the  news  always  the 
wildest  of  rumors,  which  turned  out  in  the  end  to  be  no 
news  at  all,  but  idlest  inventions  of  popular  fancy  or 


400  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXV. 

popular  fear.  Poverty  drove  unhappy  women  to  ex- 
pose their  new-born  children  almost  naked  in  the  street 
to  touch  the  pity  of  the  passers-by.  "  It  is  baptized," 
one  of  these  women  is  reported  to  have  said ;  "  what 
does  it  matter  whether  it  dies  of  cold  or  of  hunger?" 
Paris  had  its  own  excitements  too.  Duval  d'Epremes- 
nil  was  denouncing  Necker  in  the  Parliament.  The 
Parliament  was  issuing  profitless  orders  against  gam- 
bling. The  worshippers  of  the  Reformed  Churches  be- 
gan to  agitate  for  the  opening  of  their  places  of  wor- 
ship, shut  since  the  days  of  Louis  XIV.  The  town  and 
the  Chatelet,  headed  by  their  two  provosts,  the  Prov- 
ost of  the  Merchants  and  the  Provost  of  Paris,  were 
wrangling  fiercely  over  the  right  to  convoke  the  Paris 
electors.  Neither  of  these  provosts  was  over-popular. 
The  Provost  of  the  Merchants,  Lepeletier  de  Mortefon- 
taine,  a  babbling  man  of  pseudo-gallantries  with  a  taste 
for  rouge,  was  reproached  with  having  dabbled  in  mo- 
nopoly of  woods  and  charcoals.  The  Provost  of  Paris, 
who  led  the  Chatelet  faction,  Bernard  de  Boulainvilliers, 
was  popularly  accused  of  a  comprehensive  system  of 
smuggling.  It  was  said  in  those  early  January  days 
that  the  Cardinal  de  Rohan  had  actually  been  permit- 
ted to  pass  through  Paris  incognito,  the  cardinal  whose 
name  was  to  figure  in  so  many  of  the  cahiers  of  the  no- 
bility protesting  against  his  treatment.  Cerutti  was 
filling  all  literary  Paris  with  his  fury  against  Mirabeau 
for  publishing  the  correspondence  between  them ;  ener- 
getic Jesuit  Giuseppe  Antonio  Gioachimo  Cerutti  from 
Turin,  whose  fifty  years  of  life  had  made  him  liberal  in 
his  opinions,  but  had  not  taught  him  how  to  write  good 
verses.  The  frosty  air  was  so  full  of  wild  ideas  that 
the  wildest  ceased  to  excite  surprise.  A  proposal  with 
which  Dr.  Guillotin  and  new-made  notorious  Marquis 


1789.  "BLACK   BUTTERFLIES."  401 

de  Villette  were  associated  was  set  on  foot  to  erect  a 
statue  to  Louis  XVI.  on  the  Place  du  Carrousel.  Then 
some  one  else  proposed  that  the  Bastille  should  be  pull- 
ed down,  and  a  statue  of  the  king  erected  there,  with 
an  appropriate  inscription  to  the  king  as  the  destroyer 
of  state  prisons.  This  proposal  was  to  seem  curiously 
ominous  and  prophetic  presently. 

In  the  midst  of  all  this  excitement  a  couple  of  dis- 
tinguished men  passed  from  the  scene  forever.  On  Jan- 
uary 21st  Baron  d'Holbach  died,  D'Holbach  the  learned 
chemist,  the  aggressive  atheist,  the  patron  of  Diderot, 
the  friend  of  Grimm.  On  the  27th  D'Ormesson  died, 
Louis  Fran9ois  de  Paule  le  Fevre  d'Ormesson,  first  Pres- 
ident of  the  Paris  Parliament.  He  was  the  son  of  that 
most  incompetent  controller-general  who  muddled  the 
finances  in  1783,  and  who  survived  his  son  some  sixteen 
years. 

Slowly  the  winter  slipped  into  spring ;  slowly  the 
cold  abated.  But  two  things  did  not  abate — the  flood 
of  exciting  news  that  came  daily  pouring  into  Paris,  and 
the  flood  of  political  pamphlets  and  publications  of  all 
kinds  that  poured  daily  from  the  Parisian  presses.  The 
air  was  thick  with  these  "  Black  Butterflies,"  as  they 
were  playfully  called.  Seldom  has  the  world  witnessed 
such  a  flight  of  political  papers  since  Gutenberg  first 
plied  his  dangerous  craft.  In  the  midst  of  all  this 
seething  mass  of  printed  tirades,  attacks,  propositions, 
and  programmes,  there  appeared,  by  way  of  the  stran- 
gest contrast,  a  book  which  had  nothing  to  do  with  pol- 
itics, and  which  might  have  made  its  appearance  in  a 
happier  age.  This  was  the  "Voyage  du  Jeune  Ana- 
charsis  "  of  the  Abbe  Barthelemy.  For  thirty  years 
the  good  abbe  had  been  at  work  upon  this,  the  mag- 
num opus  of  his  life.  For  the  time  its  scholarship  was 
I,— 20 


402  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXV. 

profound,  and  the  scholarship  was  agreeably  gilded  with 
the  thin  gold  of  a  narrative  form.  It  is  not  perhaps 
the  most  agreeable  kind  of  fiction,  the  kind  which  seeks 
insidiously  to  distil  learning  under  the  guise  of  romance. 
The  "Gallus"  and  the  "  Charicles"  of  Becker  are  not  ex- 
actly exhilarating  books ;  they  suggest  Mr.  Barlow  and 
his  methods  too  much.  But  the  young  Anacharsis  had 
success  enough  to  delight  the  heart  of  the  old  Barthe- 
lemy.  That  long,  kindly,  smiling,  wrinkled  face,  over 
which  seventy-three  winters  had  passed,  had  every  rea- 
son now  to  beam  with  pleasure.  Some  friend  had  ad- 
vised him,  when  the  book  was  printed,  to  hold  back  its 
publication  until  the  approaching  States  -  General  had 
come  to  an  end.  Luckily  for  the  Abbe  Barthelemy,  he 
did  not  take  this  advice.  Suppose  he  had,  poor  old 
man !  would  anybody  have  ever  heard  of  the  young 
Anacharsis  at  all  ?  As  it  was,  the  book  had  a  great 
success.  Every  one  who  had  time  to  read  anything 
save  pamphlets  read  it.  The  literary  world,  the  polite 
world,  were  delighted  with  it.  Greece,  to  anticipate  a 
phrase  that  soon  became  disagreeably  familiar,  was 
the  order  of  the  day.  People  thought  Greece,  talked 
Greece,  played  at  being  Greek  at  Madame  Vigee  le 
Brun's,  where  that  pretty  paintress  gathered  her  friends 
about  her.  The  enthusiastic  Hellenists  got  up  Greek 
tableaux,  and  Dorat-Cubieres  played  with  a  lyre,  and 
Le  Brun  Pindare  shook  the  powder  from  his  hair  and 
sported  a  wreath  of  laurel.  Nothing  could  be  more 
queerly  in  contrast  with  all  that  was  happening,  with 
all  that  was  going  to  happen,  than  this  affected  aping 
of  Hellenism,  this  assumption  of  mere  literary  ease  and 
enjoyment  in  a  world  that  was  about  to  fall  to  pieces. 
It  was  dancing  on  a  volcano,  indeed,  with  a  vengeance. 
Yet  this  sudden  Hellenism  was  to  have  its  influence, 


1789.  GUARDING  AGAINST  CUPIDITY.  403 

too,  in  days  a  little  later,  when  the  mania  for  being 
Greek  or  Roman  shall  assume  grimmer  proportions. 

Steadily  the  winter  went  its  course,  steadily  the  elec- 
tions went  on  all  over  France,  steadily  the  news  of  them 
came  pouring  into  Paris,  and  steadily  soon  the  deputies 
themselves  began  to  pour  into  Paris  and  to  settle  them- 
selves in  Versailles.  The  Versailles  municipality  had  ar- 
ranged a  regular  tariff  of  charges  for  their  lodgement 
to  prevent  them  from  being  victimized  by  the  cupidity 
of  the  eager  flock  of  people  who  had  rooms  to  let.  At 
last,  as  we  have  seen,  when  the  elections  in  the  country 
were  practically  all  over,  the  Parisians  got  their  chance 
of  electing  their  deputies. 


404  T1IE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVI. 


CHAPTER  XXVI. 

THE    BOW    AT   BEVEILLON's. 

AT  this  moment  the  first  jet  of  pent  revolutionary 
flame  pierced  the  crust  and  leaped  into  the  air,  at  once 
portentous  and  perplexing.  Among  the  Paris  electors 
was  a  certain  wealthy  manufacturer  of  wall-paper,  a 
self-made  man  who  had  been  but  a  working-man,  Re- 
veillon.  De  Besenval  says  of  him,  in  his  kindly  sol- 
dierly way,  that  he  was  an  honest  man,  charitable,  well- 
approved,  who  little  merited  the  fate  he  underwent. 
Reveillon's  paper-works  were  in  the  Faubourg  Saint- 
Antoine,  within  the  very  shadow  of  the  Bastille.  In 
that  troublous,  truculent  ant-hill  of  Saint- Antoine,  where 
men  felt  the  pinch  of  poverty  very  keenly,  and  where 
rumors  flew  abroad  as  swiftly  as  they  fly  through  East- 
ern bazaars,  some  one  had  set  going  an  accusation  against 
Reveillon.  The  opulent  paper-maker  was  accused  of 
saying  scornfully  that  fifteen  sous  a  day  was  ample  pay 
for  the  workpeople.  This  seemed  to  angry  Saint- An- 
toine to  sound  badly  from  the  lips  of  one  who  had 
sprung  from  the  ranks  of  the  people,  who  had  known 
their  sufferings,  their  privations,  who  knew  better  than 
most  the  little  way  a  scant  wage  went.  Saint- Antoine 
was  angry  for  another  reason  too.  It  was  bruited 
abroad  that  Reveillon  was  to  receive  the  order  of 
Saint  Michael.  Saint-Antoine  grumbled  ominously  in 
its  wine  -  shops,  its  garrets,  its  cellars.  Who  was  this 
man  who  cheapened  the  pittance  of  the  poor,  who  ac- 
cepted the  decorations  of  the  rich  ?  Saint-Antoine  did 


1789.  THE  FIFTEEN  SOUS.  405 

more  than  merely  grumble.  It  marched  in  considerable 
numbers  to  the  door  of  Reveillon's  factory,  and  there 
placed  an  effigy  of  the  obnoxious  paper-maker  sus.  per 
coll.,  with  the  decoration  on  the  puppet's  breast.  After 
a  while  they  took  the  image  down,  carried  it  in  triumph 
to  the  Place  de  la  Greve,  and  there  burned  it  to  ashes 
under  the  very  windows  of  the  Town -hall,  with  many 
denunciations  of  Reveillon,  and  threats  that  they  would 
return  again  to  wreak  sterner  justice. 

A  marvellous  affair,  this  affair  Reveillon.  A  matter 
of  small  moment  it  would  almost  seem,  and  yet  a  mat- 
ter of  great  moment  as  the  first  flare-up  of  revolutionary 
fires.  It  is  difficult  to  make  head  or  tail  of  the  whole 
business,  so  desperately  has  it  been  confused  by  the 
different  stories  told  of  it.  Reveillon  was  the  first  to 
thrive  in  France  upon  the  making  of  wall-papers  in  the 
English  manner.  He  was  wealthy  after  the  labors  of 
some  eight-and-forty  years.  His  factory  was  more  like 
a  palace.  He  had  magnificent  gardens,  from  which  a 
few  years  before  the  Mongolfier  balloon  mounted  to 
heaven.  He  employed  about  eight  hundred  workmen. 
He  was  one  of  the  electors  of  the  Paris  delegates  for 
the  Third  Estate.  Saint-Antoine,  suspicious,  populous 
with  small  artisans,  seems  to  have  looked  with  no  loving 
eye  upon  him.  Who  started  the  damning  story  about 
the  fifteen  sous  ?  Reveillon  said,  then  and  after,  that 
it  was  started  by  a  certain  Abbe  Roy,  a  needy  ecclesias- 
tic, patronized  by  the  Count  d'Artois.  Roy  came  near 
to  being  hanged  for  it,  later,  innocent  or  guilty;  he  was 
not  hanged,  he  was  forgotten.  But  according  to  Reveil- 
lon, he  was  his  enemy,  and  went  abroad  spreading  tales 
against  him,  including  that  worst  tale  of  all  about  the 
fifteen  sous.  There  were  plenty  to  believe  the  story,  as 
Reveillon  found  to  his  cost. 


406  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXVI. 

That  worthy  soldier  and  amiable  story-teller,  M.  de 
Besenval,  was  much  perturbed  by  these  proceedings. 
For  eight  years  De  Besenval  had  been  intrusted  with 
the  command  of  the  provinces  of  the  interior — the  Sois- 
sonnais,  the  Bourbonnais,  the  Orleannais,  Berry,  Tou- 
raine,  Maine,  and  the  Isle  of  France,  the  city  of  Paris 
excepted.  The  command,  sufficiently  engrossing  at  all 
times,  became  very  arduous  in  the  April  of  1789,  in 
consequence  of  the  disette  and  the  scarcity  of  grain. 
The  markets  became  the  scenes  of  stormy  riots.  At- 
tacks were  made  upon  government  convoys.  De  Be- 
senval, at  his  wits'  end  to  protect  all  parts,  was  obliged 
to  divide  his  troops  in  order  to  watch  over  all  the  mar- 
kets in  his  command,  and  to  keep  in  check  the  "brig- 
ands," grown  audacious  by  the  excitement  of  the  time. 
Still,  De  Besenval  proudly  records  that  he  accomplished 
his  task,  that  he  kept  order  with  the  greatest  success, 
that  everything  went  well  until,  alas!  until  the  unex- 
pected came  to  pass.  De  Besenval  had  nothing  to  do  with 
the  maintenance  of  order  in  Paris  ;  but  when  the  good 
city  began  to  "ferment,"authoi-ity  in  Paris  had  to  call  for 
the  aid  of  the  two  regiments  of  the  French  Guards  and 
the  Swiss  to  help  them  in  maintaining  order.  The  com- 
mand of  these  two  regiments  devolved  upon  the  Due  du 
Chatelet  and  the  Count  d'Affry.  As  luck  would  have 
it,  the  Count  d'Affry  had  an  accident  which  brought 
him  to  death's-door,  and  De  Besenval,  who  was  his  sec- 
ond in  command  of  the  Swiss,  had  to  take  his  place, 
and  add  the  care  of  Paris  to  all  his  other  cares.  Poor 
De  Besenval !  some  sleepless  hours  were  in  store  for 
him.  No  more  writing  of  his  graceful  tales,  no  more 
dreamings  of  a  fair  royal  face.  The  cares  of  Paris,  the 
correspondence  of  his  command,  and  the  duty  of  seeing 
Paris  properly  supplied  with  corn — these  duties,  which 


1789.  RtiVEILLON'S  FLIGHT.  407 

keep  him  busy  day  and  night,  were  among  the  last 
services  he  will  be  called  upon  to  render  to  royalty. 

In  the  opening  days  of  April  De  Besenval  was  duly 
informed  of  the  arrival  in  Paris  of  large  bodies  of  most 
ill-looking  strangers,  vile  fellows  in  scarecrow  tatters, 
brandishing  huge  batoons,  and  babbling  all  the  thieves' 
lingoes  under  heaven.  These  uncanny  crews,  it  seemed, 
always  set  in  their  staff  in  the  Faubourg  Saint-Antoine, 
and  mischief  might  confidently  be  expected  from  them. 
On  April  27th  news  was  brought  to  De  Besenval  and 
to  Du  Chatelet  of  the  disturbances  in  Saint-Antoine  and 
the  menaces  levelled  at  paper-maker  Reveillon.  Du 
Chatelet  despatched  a  sergeant  and  thirty  men  of  the 
French  Guard  to  the  spot,  and  hoped  all  would  be  well. 

All  was  by  no  means  well.  The  men  who  had  men- 
aced Reveillon  kept  their  word.  They  came  back  again 
— vast  battalions  of  rascaldom — and  made  ferociously 
merry  at  the  expense  of  Du  Chatelet's  poor  thirty  men. 
They  sacked  the  house  of  Reveillon's  neighbor,  Hen- 
riot  ;  Henriot  had  to  fly  for  his  life.  The  little  hand- 
ful of  soldiers  dared  do  nothing,  could  do  nothing, 
against  the  furious  mob.  They  had  to  stand  quietly 
by,  thankful  that  nobody  troubled  about  them.  No- 
body did  trouble  about  them  ;  all  that  the  wild  crowd 
wanted  was  to  get  hold  of  Reveillon,  and  failing  that, 
to  do  as  much  damage  as  might  be  to  Reveillon's  prop- 
erty. Reveillon  himself  they  did  not  get.  He  had  pru- 
dently slipped  across  to  the  Bastille.  Behind  its  mas- 
sive walls  he  deemed  himself  secure.  From  its  towers 
he  could  behold  the  ruin  of  his  splendid  house,  fair  with 
the  paintings  of  Le  Brun. 

The  electors  of  Paris  were  seated  tranquilly  at  the 
Archbishopric,  proceeding  to  fuse  together  the  cahiers 
of  the  different  districts  into  a  common  cahier.  Bailly 


408  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVI. 

had  noted,  indifferently,  the  absence  of  Reveillon  from 
the  council.  Suddenly  the  proceedings  were  interrupt- 
ed by  a  clattering  at  the  door,  and  the  irruption  of  an 
armed  and  angry  crowd  raving  for  the  absent  Reveil- 
lon's  head.  About  the  same  time,  or  earlier,  De  Besen- 
val's  morning  hours  were  broken  in  upon  by  Du  Chate- 
let,  alarmed,  and  excited  with  the  news  of  the  wildest 
disturbances  in  the  Faubourg  Saint -Antoine.  Every 
moment  fresh  tidings  came  in  to  the  two  perplexed  offi- 
cers. News  came  of  riot,  of  pillage,  of  a  large  crowd 
growing  momentarily  larger,  of  the  helpless  handful  of 
soldiers  who  had  not  dared  to  fire  a  shot.  Du  Chatelet 
saw  that  something  must  be  done  more  decisive  than 
the  despatch  of  thirty  men.  He  sent  off  some  compa- 
nies of  grenadiers,  with  orders  to  fire  if  need  be. 

There  is  a  picturesque  episode  in  the  Reveillon  riot 
which  is  not  generally  noted.  When  the  mob — bandits, 
blackguards,  bravoes,  whatever  they  were — had  swept 
Du  Chatelet's  luckless  thirty  men  to  one  side,  and  were 
beating  in  the  doors  of  the  factory,  an  old  woman  sud- 
denly appeared  upon  the  threshold,  and  boldly  called 
upon  the  assailants  to  pause.  She  was  old,  it  seems,  in 
the  Reveillon  service ;  she  called  loudly  for  pity,  for 
justice ;  she  declared  that  the  people  were  deceived. 
Poor,  impassioned,  eloquent  old  lady,  the  brigands  put 
her  aside  in  no  time,  but  not  unkindly,  and  the  work 
of  ravage  began. 

In  the  midst  of  all  the  clamors  and  the  crashing  tim- 
bers, gilded  coaches  came  upon  the  scene  —  stately 
coaches  with  delicately  painted  panels,  bearing  deli- 
cately painted  ladies  and  delicate  attendant  lords  to 
Vincennes.  Saint- Antoine,  pausing  in  its  work  of  de- 
struction, or  witnessing  destruction  by  others,  raged  at 
the  gilt  carriages  and  their  occupants  in  an  ominous, 


1789.  A  DESPERATE  FIGHT.  400 

uncomely  manner,  and  the  pretty  pageant  dispersed, 
rolling  its  wheels  rapidly.  Only  the  Duke  of  Orleans, 
recognized  by  the  crowd,  and  raising  his  plumed  hat, 
passed  on  his  way  in  curious  triumph.  It  was  said  that 
he  came  on  purpose  to  encourage  the  rioters. 

When  Du  Chatelet's  men  arrived  on  the  scene  of  ac- 
tion they  found. the  street  so  choked  with  people  that 
it  was  difficult  to  force  a  way  to  the  paper  factory,  in 
which  the  assailants  had  now  lodged  themselves,  and  in 
which  they  were  making  wild  carnival,  breaking  every- 
thing they  could  break,  and  drinking  everything  they 
could  drink,  to  the  cost  of  some  of  them,  who  took 
some  patent  acid  employed  in  the  preparation  of  Re- 
veillon's  painted  papers  for  some  choice  cordial,  and 
drained  a  terrible  death.  Those  who  found  wine  drank 
deep  and  desperately,  as  sailors  will  do  in  a  sinking 
ship,  and  fiery  with  false  courage,  they  faced  the  dis- 
ciplined soldiers  that  now  marched  down  against  them. 
The  rioters  had  only  sticks  to  oppose  to  the  bayonets 
of  the  soldiers  ;  they  could  only  exchange  a  rain  of 
tiles  from  the  roof  against  the  rain  of  lead  from  the 
levelled  muskets ;  but  they  held  their  own,  fighting  des- 
perately. Defeated,  dispersed  in  the  street,  they  rallied 
within  the  walls  of  Reveillon's  gutted  building,  and 
held  it,  fighting  with  tigerish  tenacity  all  through  that 
livelong  day.  The  police  spies  kept  coming  and  going 
between  the  scene  of  fight  and  the  quarters  where  De 
Besenval  and  Du  Chatelet  waited  and  wondered.  Very 
difficult  these  spies  found  it  either  to  penetrate  into  the 
crowd  around  Reveillon's  door,  or  to  get  out  of  it  again 
when  they  had  so  penetrated.  To  make  up  for  delay, 
they  brought  back  the  most  astonishing  stories,  spoke 
of  people  they  had  seen  inciting  the  rioters  to  further 
tumult,  and  even  distributing  money. 


410  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  XXVI. 

The  fight  still  raged  on,  desperate  as  that  last  wild 
fight  in  the  halls  of  Atli  which  we  read  of  in  the  great 
Icelandic  epic.  At  last  De  Besenval  determined  that  this 
should  end  one  way  or  the  other.  He  sent  companies  of 
his  Swiss  off  as  fast  as  they  could  go  to  Saint- An  toine, 
taking  with  them  two  pieces  of  cannon,  and  the  concise 
instructions,  if  they  were  resisted,  to  kill  until  not  one 
of  the  rioters  was  left.  The  sight  of  the  cannon  pro- 
duced a  calming  effect  upon  the  bulk  of  the  mob,  which 
speedily  evaporated ;  but  the  desperate  men  inside  Re- 
veillon's  still  held  good,  still  fought  and  defied.  The 
Swiss  fired  upon  them  again  and  again,  carried  the  fac- 
tory by  storming,  forced  room  after  room  of  the  place, 
bayoneting  and  shooting  the  rioters.  A  great  many 
were  killed,  a  great  many  were  wounded  and  died  later. 
It  was  a  bloody  piece  of  work  from  first  to  last,  but  to 
De  Besenval  belongs  such  credit  as  there  was  for  stamp- 
ing it  out.  It  was,  indeed,  only  like  stamping  out  a 
small  piece  of  lighted  paper  while  the  forest  is  taking 
fire  behind  you  ;  but  still  it  was  something,  and  poor 
De  Besenval  got  small  thanks  for  it.  The  court  looked 
coldly  upon  him,  as  he  thought.  Paris  was  not  pro- 
foundly grateful  to  him.  The  stamping -out  process 
came  too  late.  It  saved  Reveillon ;  it  could  not  save 
the  monarchy.  The  carnage  left  its  bitter  memories. 
The  number  of  the  slain  has  been  much  exaggerated. 
Bailly  has  even  left  it  on  record  that  he  did  not  think 
any  one  was  killed.  But  a  great  many  were  killed,  and 
their  deaths  were  not  found  deterrent. 

So  ended  the  Reveillon  episode,  which  may  be  look- 
ed upon  as  the  lever  de  rideau,  the  curtain-raiser  of 
the  Revolution.  To  this  hour  it  is  uncertain  who  the 
men  were  who  instigated  the  attack,  who  led  it,  and 
who  defended  themselves  with  such  desperate  courage. 


1789.  THEORIES  AND  THEORIES.  411 

Reveillon's  workmen  were  not  with  them  or  of  them ; 
for  it  would  appear,  in  despite  of  that  rumor  about  the 
fifteen  sous,  that  he  was  a  kind  master,  in  good  favor 
with  those  in  his  employment.  Nor  was  it,  either,  a 
rising  of  the  Faubourg  Saint-Antoine.  Children  of 
Saint-Antoine  may  have  mingled  in  the  mass,  may  have 
taken  part  in  the  fray  for  sheer  desperate  love  of  fight- 
ing, and  a  kind  of  devilish  Celtic  delight  in  the  fun  of 
the  thing.  But  the  faubourg  at  large,  the  faubourg  as 
a  faubourg,  if  we  may  be  permitted  the  phrase,  looked 
on  with  folded  arms,  and,  if  it  said  much,  did  little  or 
nothing.  All  sorts  of  fantastic  theories  flutter,  carrion- 
like,  round  the  graves  and  the  gibbets  of  Reveillon's 
mysterious  assailants.  De  Besenval,  disliking  to  dis- 
trust even  so  scapegrace  a  kinsman  of  the  royal  house 
as  the  Duke  of  Orleans,  decided  in  a  convenient,  indefi- 
nite way  that  it  must  have  been  the  English.  Others, 
less  particular,  insisted  that  it  was  done  by  Orleans  and 
his  faction.  Later  students  have  actually  thought  that 
it  was  a  put-up  job  on  the  part  of  the  court,  in  the  hope 
that  by  the  wholesale  complicity  of  Saint-Antoine  they 
would  be  provided  with  a  sufficient  excuse  for  flooding 
Paris  with  soldiery,  and  suppressing  the  inconveniently 
disaffected.  Whoever  set  the  thing  going,  there  were 
certainly  in  Paris  enough  desperate  characters  ready  to 
bear  a  hand  in  any  desperate  enterprise  which  might  be 
rewarded  with  a  pocketful  of  coin,  or  even  a  skinful  of 
liquor.  News  of  any  kind  of  disturbance  or  possible 
disturbance  in  the  capital  naturally  attracted  to  Paris 
all  the  seedy  rogues,  all  the  vagrom  men,  all  the  queer 
kinsmen  and  dependents  of  the  chivalry  of  the  road. 
On  every  highway  and  by  -  way  in  France,  thievish 
tramps  turned  their  thoughts  and  their  steps  towards 
Paris.  If  any  one  wanted  to  foment  a  disturbance, 


412  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVI. 

there  was  plenty  of  material  ready  to  hand  to  be  had 
for  the  buying.  The  result,  in  any  case,  told  for  the 
Revolution.  The  fierce  bloodshed  enraged  Saint- An- 
toine,  the  desperate  strife  showed  Saint-Antoine  how 
such  things  might  be  done,  and  how  hard  it  was  to 
cope  with  the  doers.  Reveillon,  shivering  and  sighing 
behind  the  Bastille  walls,  might  have  felt  still  less  at 
ease  if  he  could  have  seen  but  a  poor  six  weeks  ahead 
into  futurity,  and  learned  that  the  fortress  of  a  king 
was  no  more  stable  than  the  factory  of  a  maker  of  paint- 
ed papers.  But  he  was  no  seer.  He  was  compensated 
by  the  king  for  his  losses,  and  straightway  vanishes 
from  history  and  leaves  not  a  rack  behind.  He  earned 
the  distinction  of  being  the  first  plaything  of  the  Paris 
mob ;  he  had  better  fortune  than  their  next  playthings, 
as  we  shall  presently  see.  What  became  of  him  after- 
wards, where  he  drifted,  and  how  he  ended,  we  have  not 
been  able  to  find  out. 

It  will  probably  never  be  known  how  the  Reveillon 
business  did  actually  originate.  The  fact,  if  fact  it  be, 
as  would  seem  on  Reveillon's  own  showing,  that  noth- 
ing was  stolen,  puts  the  affair  out  of  the  category  of  a 
mere  vulgar  raid  for  plunder  upon  a  building  exposed 
to  assault  by  its  owner's  unpopularity.  The  desperate 
resistance,  again,  which  the  rioters  offered  to  the  royal 
troops  implies  a  degree  of  courage  and  determination 
not  usually  to  be  found  in  merely  needy  or  merely  mis- 
chievous rioters.  The  stories  of  men  in  rich  attire,  of 
men  in  women's  garb,  who  were  seen  egging  the  mob 
on  are  a  trifle  cloudy  and  incoherent ;  so  too  are  the 
tales  of  sums  of  gold  in  the  pinched  pockets  of  meagre 
rascaldom.  That  the  killed  and  wounded  came  to  be 
talked  of  by  their  kind  as  "  defenders  of  the  country  " 
counts  for  something  in  the  argument  that  the  move- 


1789.  A   NATURAL   RESULT.  413 

merit,  such  as  it  was,  was  largely  popular  and  sponta- 
neous. After  all,  there  is  nothing  very  surprising,  in 
the  then  electric  condition  of  Paris,  in  the  fact  that  a 
mob,  irritated  by  what  they  believed  to  be  a  rich  man's 
scorn  of  the  poor  man's  need,  should  incontinently  pro- 
ceed to  break  the  rich  man's  windows  and  express  a 
large  desire  to  break  the  rich  man's  head.  The  rash 
words  of  another  man  cost  the  speaker  far  dearer  not 
very  many  days  or  weeks  later.  It  would  not  be  sur- 
prising, either,  if  unscrupulous  persons  were  to  be  found, 
of  any  party,  ready  to  take  advantage  of  an  inflamed 
popular  feeling  to  manipulate  riot  for  their  own  ulterior 
purposes  and  advantage.  Whatever  we  may  think, 
with  Reveillon,  of  the  participation  of  Abbe  Roy,  with 
De  Besenval  of  the  machinations  of  England,  with  oth- 
ers about  the  dodges  of  Orleans,  and  with  yet  others 
about  the  militant  purposes  of  the  court,  one  thing  re- 
mains clear  and  incontrovertible — that  Reveillon  be- 
came suddenly  unpopular  on  account  of  words  attribut- 
ed to  him,  that  a  mob  ravaged  his  premises,  and  that 
the  riot  was  bloodily  suppressed.  The  democratic  eye, 
heedless  of  minute  possibilities,  saw  in  the  whole  affair 
a  movement  of  not  unjustifiable  popular  passion  sav- 
agely suppressed  by  the  soldiery  of  a  not  too  popular 
king. 


414         THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.     CH.  XXVIL 


CHAPTER   XXVIL 

STATES  -  GENERAL     AT    LAST. 

Two  days  after  the  battle  round  Revcillon's  shop,  or 
rather  palace,  the  not  too  popular  king  was  reviewing 
his  deputies  at  Versailles,  and  not  increasing  his  popu- 
larity in  the  process.  The  deputies  of  the  Third  Estate, 
to  begin  with,  were  by  no  means  pleased  at  the  choice 
of  Versailles  for  the  session  of  the  States- General.  Paris 
seemed  the  most  obvious  place  for  the  purpose  ;  Paris 
would  have  been  a  much  cheaper  place  for  deputies  not 
too  well  off.  The  choice  of  Versailles  made  the  States- 
General  resemble  too  much  a  plenary  court  to  please  the 
Third  Estate.  Then,  too,  the  manner  of  presentation  to 
the  king  irritated  the  susceptible.  The  deputies  were 
presented,  thanks  to  Master  of  Ceremonies  de  Ereze 
by  order  and  not  by  their  bailiwicks,  which  would  have 
seemed  the  simpler,  more  natural  course.  These  were 
small  things,  but  they  rankled.  It  was  plain  from  the 
first  that  concord  was  not  the  order  of  the  hour. 

On  May  4th,  amid  vast  crowds,  the  States-General 
paraded  through  Versailles  from  the  Parish  Church  of 
Our  Lady,  where  they  heard  the  "  Veni  Creator,"  to  the 
Church  of  St.  Louis,  where  a  mass  of  the  Holy  Ghost 
was  celebrated.  It  is  the  most  famous  pageant  in 
history ;  it  has  been  described  a  thousand  times ;  the 
thought  of  it  always  stirs  the  blood  and  thrills  the 
pulses.  Versailles  was  resplendent  for  the  occasion. 
The  streets  were  hung  with  tapestries ;  the  French  and 


1789.  A   MARVELLOUS  SIGHT.  415 

Swiss  Guards  kept  the  line  between  the  two  churches; 
all  the  balconies  along  the  way  were  hung  with  precious 
stuffs.  By  one  of  those  chances  which  sometimes  make 
Nature  seem  in  exquisite  harmony  with  the  actions  of 
men,  the  day  was  divinely  fair — an  ideal  May  day.  The 
air  was  steeped  in  sunlight,  the  streets  were  brave  with 
banners,  the  air  rang  with  martial  music,  and  the  swell 
of  sacred  bells,  the  beat  of  drum  and  blare  of  trumpet, 
blended  with  the  chanting  of  the  priests.  The  world 
glowed  with  color.  When  did  the  skies  seem  deeper 
blue,  the  trees  and  grasses  more  richly  green  ?  The 
clear  sunlight  lent  a  rarer  value  to  the  delicate  dyes  of 
silken  garment,  to  the  jewels  on  women's  bosoms  and 
the  gold  on  courtly  swords.  The  court  shone  in  its 
brightest  splendor  for  that  brilliant  hour.  It  thought 
to  participate  in  a  triumph  ;  it  shared  unawares  in  a 
sacrifice.  It  gleamed  and  dazzled  then  for  the  last 
time,  and  walked  all  unconsciously  in  its  own  funeral. 
For  in  front  of  all  that  world  of  plumes  and  jewels,  of 
fair  powdei'ed  heads  and  fair  painted  faces,  of  chival- 
rous long-lineaged  nobility,  walked,  arrayed  in  solemn 
black,  their  judges,  their  executioners,  their  fate,  the 
deputies  of  the  Third  Estate. 

All  France,  says  an  historian,  was  at  Paris,  all  Paris 
was  at  Versailles.  Every  inch  of  available  standing- 
room  was  thronged.  At  every  window,  on  every  bal- 
cony, bright  eyes  watched  the  marvellous  sight,  and  fair 
lips  praised  or  blamed  as  the  speaker  leaned  to  the  court 
or  to  the  new  ideas.  First  of  all,  at  the  head  of  the 
procession,  came  a  sombre  mass  of  black  relieved  by 
touches  of  white;  this  was  the  Third  Estate,  lugubrious- 
ly attired,  raven-like,  ominous.  More  than  five  hundred 
deputies,  in  the  gloomy  garb  that  ceremony  forced  upon 
them,  moved  slowly  along,  a  compact  body,  while  the 


416  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVII. 

warm  air  trembled  to  the  enthusiastic  cheers  of  the 
spectators.  The  cheers  lulled  suddenly  into  a  grim  si- 
lence as  the  black  band  of  the  Third  Estate  was  succeed- 
ed by  the  rainbow  brightness  of  the  many-hued  nobility. 
There  were  friends  of  the  people  in  those  butterfly 
ranks,  but  one  alone  was  noted  out  for  salutation,  the 
dark,  adventurous  Orleans,  who  ostentatiously  stood 
ahead  of  his  own  order  to  mingle  with  the  later  ranks 
of  the  Third  Estate.  "  Long  live  Orleans!"  the  people 
cried,  and  for  a  moment  the  weary  vicious  face  glowed 
with  exultation,  as  it  had  glowed  but  four  days  earlier 
when  the  Reveillon  rioters  had  acclaimed  him.  "Long 
live  Orleans!"  Perhaps  he  thought,  as  he  smiled,  of  a 
lengthy  life,  of  a  royal  crown. 

The  same  silence  that  had  greeted  the  nobility  greet- 
ed also  the  clergy,  the  clergy  in  whose  own  ranks  a 
division  into  two  orders  was  distinctly  visible.  Some 
thirty  princes  of  the  Church  came  first  in  purple  and 
fine  linen,  a  resplendent  hierarchy.  Then  came  a  com- 
pany of  musicians,  and  at  their  heels  trod  the  clerical 
Third  Estate,  the  two  hundred  parish  priests  in  their 
black  gowns.  Thus,  in  funereal  melancholy  sable,  the 
procession  of  the  deputies  of  the  States-General  began 
and  ended.  That,  too,  was  ominous  to  the  perception, 
to  the  prophetic  eye.  Those  black-garbed  priests  were 
to  be  the  first  to  join  with  their  black-clad  brethren  of 
the  Third  Estate.  Both  alike  represented  the  people. 

At  the  end  of  the  procession  came  the  king  and  the 
court.  Some  cheers  were  accorded  to  the  monarch, 
partly  the  cheers  of  not  ungenerous  victors,  partly  cheers 
of  gratitude  for  the  convocation  of  the  States-General. 
The  queen  was  greeted  only  by  a  grave  and  menacing 
silence,  which  she  affected  to  brave  with  a  proud  in- 
difference, But  some  women  in  the  crowd  cried  out, 


1789.  A  PROPHECY.  417 

in  mocking  hostility  to  Marie  Antoinette,  the  war-cry, 
"  Long  live  Orleans !"  The  queen  heard  the  sounds, 
she  saw  a  gleam  of  joy,  of  triumph,  in  the  eyes  of  the 
Duchess  of  Orleans;  for  a  second  her  courage  failed  her; 
she  reeled,  almost  fainted,  had  to  be  sustained  by  the 
fond  arms  of  Madame  de  Lamballe.  In  another  mo- 
ment she  was  herself  again,  and  went  with  head  held 
high  to  the  end. 

Among  all  the  spectators  of  that  splendid  scene,  one 
of  the  most  interested,  one  of  the  most  interesting,  was 
Necker's  daughter,  Madame  de  Stae'l.  Madame  de  Stae'l 
was  in  the  wildest  spirits.  She  saw  in  all  that  was  hap- 
pening only  a  tribute  to  the  genius  of  the  father  she 
adored.  It  was  all  the  creation  of  his  majestic  mind,  to 
Madame  de  Stae'l,  and  she  exulted  accordingly.  With 
her,  watching  from  the  same  window,  was  Madame  de 
Montmorin,  wife  of  the  Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs. 
She  strove  to  check  Madame  de  Stael's  exuberant  gayety. 
"  You  are  wrong  to  rejoice,"  she  said,  gravely.  "  Great 
troubles  will  come  from  all  this  for  France  and  for  us." 
Pathetic,  prophetic  speech,  dimly  foreshadowing  her 
own  death  on  the  scaffold,  her  son's  death  on  the  scaf- 
fold, her  husband's  death  in  the  September  massacres, 
her  daughter's  death  in  a  prison  hospital !  She  was  not, 
Madame  de  Stae'l  thought,  a  very  wise  woman;  but  she 
was  wise  enough  to  see  more  in  the  pageant  of  that  day 
than  Keeker's  daughter  saw  in  it,  and  to  gather  vaguely 
some  dim  tragic  perception  of  the  awful  forces  that  lay 
latent  behind  its  noise  and  pomp  and  glitter.  It  is  char- 
acteristic of  the  fateful  time,  this  queer  gleam  of  sec- 
ond sight  vouchsafed  to  the  commonplace  wife  of  a 
commonplace  minister  of  state.  Wiser  eyes  did  not  see 
so  far:  wiser  tongues  were  less  truly  prophetic. 

Inside  the  Church  of  St.  Louis  the  three  orders  took 
I.— 27 


418  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVII. 

their  places  in  the  nave.  The  king  and  the  queen  sat 
under  a  canopy  of  purple  velvet  starred  with  the  golden 
lily  flowers  of  their  line.  Round  them  were  ranged  the 
princes  of  the  royal  blood  and  the  flower  of  the  court. 
A  sweet -voiced  choir  raised  the  hymn  "O  Salutaris 
hostia"  as  the  host  was  placed  upon  the  altar.  Then  M. 
cle  la  Farre,  Archbishop  of  Nancy,  passed  into  the  pulpit 
and  preached.  His  sermon  was  inspired  by  the  feeling  of 
the  hour ;  it  became  a  kind  of  political  pronouncement. 
Royalist  writers  reproached  him  promptly  for  declama- 
tions on  the  luxury  and  despotism  of  courts,  the  duties 
of  sovereigns,  and  the  rights  of  the  people,  but  he  cer- 
tainly succeeded  in  arousing  at  least  the  temporary  en- 
thusiasm of  his  audience.  When,  after  a  glowing  pict- 
ure of  the  evils  of  the  fiscal  system  and  the  sufferings 
of  the  country,  he  asked  if  such  barbarous  exactions 
should  be  done  in  the  name  of  a  good,  just,  and  wise 
king,  the  enthusiasm  of  his  hearers  took  fire,  and  vented 
itself  in  loud  and  prolonged  applause,  oblivious  alike  of 
the  sacred  character  of  the  edifice  and  of  the  presence  of 
the  king,  before  whom  it  was  not  etiquette  to  applaud, 
even  at  the  play.  With  the  echo  of  that  applause  in 
their  ears,  noting  markedly  how  the  old  traditions  were 
losing  hold,  the  States-General  came  out  of  the  Church 
of  Saint  Louis  at  four  o'clock  of  the  May  afternoon,  to 
wait  patiently  or  impatiently,  according  to  their  tem- 
peraments, for  the  morrow. 


1789.  THE  SALLE   DES  MENUS.  419 


CHAPTER   XXVIII. 

THE    PLAY   BEGINS. 

VERSAILLES  woke  up  on  the  morning  of  May  5, 1789, 
with  the  memory  of  all  the  brave  doings  of  yesterday 
still  buzzing  in  its  brain,  to  take  part  in,  or  to  take  an 
interest  in,  a  no  less  imposing  and  a  yet  more  impor- 
tant ceremony.  The  proceedings  of  May  4th  were  like 
the  overture  before  the  curtain  rises.  With  this  May  5th 
the  play  was  really  to  begin.  The  three  estates  of  the 
realm  were  to  meet  their  monarch  for  the  first  time  for 
two  centuries,  and  nobody  could  be  confident,  except 
perhaps  the  ever  -  confident  Necker,  as  to  what  might 
come  of  the  meeting.  The  Assembly  was  to  open  in 
the  Salle  des  Menus  in  the  Avenue  de  Paris.  The 
Salle  des  Menus  exists  no  more.  If  a  new  Villon,  weary 
of  regrets  for  the  lords  and  ladies  of  old  time,  were  to 
tune  his  verse  to  a  ballad  for  the  lost  buildings  of  the 
world  which  men  might  most  regret,  he  should  include 
the  Salle  des  Menus,  with  the  temple  of  the  Ephesian 
Diana  and  the  palace  of  Kubla  Khan,  in  the  burden  of 
his  despair.  For,  never  since  man  first  reared  houses 
out  of  reeds,  or  quarried  holes  in  the  sides  of  the  eternal 
hills,  has  any  edifice  been  the  theatre  of  a  more  mo- 
mentous event,  or  more  deserving  to  be  preserved  for 
the  sake  of  its  deathless  associations.  But  the  Salle 
des  Menus  has  passed  away  in  fact;  in  fancy,  however, 
we  can  reconstruct  it.  The  painter's  and  the  graver's 
art  have  preserved  for  us  its  seeming,  and  it  needs  no 


420  TUB  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVIII. 

great  effort  of  the  imagination  to  call  up  that  stately 
hall,  large  enough  to  hold  more  than  five  thousand  per- 
sons, and  rich  on  this  May  day  with  all  the  splendor 
of  a  courtly  ceremony.  We  can  see  the  spacious  floors, 
its  carpets  glittering  with  the  golden  fleurs  de  lis  of 
the  Bourbon  House,  the  majestic  curve  of  the  painted 
ceiling,  where  a  picturesque  mythology  gambolled,  the 
range  of  massive  pillars  on  either  side  of  the  hall  which 
separated  the  eager  beholders  from  the  centre  field 
for  the  performers  in  the  pageant  of  the  day.  We  can 
note  the  lofty  dais,  with  its  terraced  lines  of  steps,  at 
the  summit  of  which  the  throne  was  placed,  and  over 
which  the  velvet  canopy  extended.  We  can  watch  the 
royal  pages  in  their  bright  apparel  as  they  moved  hither 
and  thither  on  their  courtly  duties.  We  can  catch  the 
gleam  of  steel  and  the  blending  of  blue  and  scarlet 
where  here  and  there  a  soldier  stood  on  guard.  The 
Salle  des  Menus  is  gone,  its  bricks  and  mortar,  its  mar- 
ble pillars,  its  painted  walls  and  lily-laden  carpets  have 
had  their  day  and  ceased  to  be.  The  wind  has  carried 
them  all  away.  But  fancy  lingers  for  an  instant  fondly 
over  the  fair  theatre  it  has  refashioned  for  the  great 
Mystery  Play  of  the  Deluge.  Here  it  was  at  last,  this 
deluge  Louis  XV.  had  lightly  prophesied,  its  first  waves 
rising  round  the  throne  with  the  beginning  of  that  May 
day's  proceedings. 

The  proceedings  opened,  if  not  stormily,  certainly  irri- 
tably. Foolish  court  etiquette  barred  the  entrance  of 
the  Salle  des  Menus  to  the  deputies.  None  was  suffered 
to  pass  in  save  after  a  regular  summons  from  the  her- 
alds-at-arms  ;  which  done,  the  master  of  the  ceremonies 
marshalled  each  man  to  his  place  according  to  his  degree 
and  the  degree  of  his  bailiwick,  in  accordance  with  the 
fusty  precedent  of  1614.  This  fusty  precedent  had  for 


1789.  AN  UNNATURAL  TRINITY.  421 

first  result  to  keep  a  large  number  of  deputies  wedged 
together  in  a  dark  and  narrow  lobby  or  corridor,  and 
for  second  result  to  arouse  considerable  spleen  against 
the  pedantic,  slow  formality.  Deputies  pushed,  clam- 
ored, refused  to  answer  to  their  call  or  take  their  places ; 
it  took  hard  upon  three  hours  to  get  them  into  their 
places.  In  the  midst  of  the  hubbub  Equality  Orleans, 
avid  of  popularity,  won  some  thunderous  applause  by 
insisting  on  the  humble  priest  who  shared  with  him  the 
representation  of  Crepy  en  Valois  passing  into  the  great 
hall  before  him. 

The  deputies,  seated  at  last,  and  comparatively  tran- 
quil, had  nearly  an  hour  before  them  in  which  to  survey 
the  stately  Salle  des  Menus,  to  gaze  at  and  be  gazed  at 
by  the  glittering  mob  that  thronged  the  side  galleries, 
and  to  study  each  other  with  that  half-timid  specula- 
tion peculiar  to  all  large  bodies  of  strangers  brought 
suddenly  into  close  association.  Nigh  on  to  one  o'clock 
the  king  made  his  appearance,  a  royal  sun  with  a  train 
of  shining  satellites,  and  the  enthusiastic  deputies — for 
Robespierre  still  was  loyal,  and  Orleans  still  shammed 
loyalty — sprang  to  their  feet  and  hailed  him,  so  official 
record  assures  us, "  with  cries  of  joy."  The  king  and 
queen  took  their  places,  the  royal  princes  and  the  rest 
of  the  courtly  following  settled  down  too,  the  ministers 
sat  at  the  table  allotted  to  them,  the  "  cries  of  joy  "  died 
down  and  faded  out,  Master  of  Ceremonies  De  Breze 
lifted  his  hand  for  silence — announced  that  the  king 
would  speak.  The  king  got  up,  and  the  great  play 
began. 

So,  from  all  the  ends  of  France  the  States-General 
had  come  together,  and  faced  each  other  in  the  Salle  des 
Menus — a  kind  of  unnatural  trinity,  a  three  that  were 
by  no  means  one.  "August  and  touching  ceremony," 


422  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXVIII. 

said  the  Marquis  de  Ferrieres,  when  he  rewrote  for  his 
memoirs  the  description  he  had  penned  for  his  own 
pleasure  immediately  after  the  event.  August  it  cer- 
tainly was,  touching  too,  though  not  perhaps  quite  in 
the  sense  in  which  De  Ferrieres  intended  it.  It  was  the 
tragic  preface  to  the  most  tragic  epoch  in  history.  Mi- 
rabeau,  with  his  fine  perception,  caught  and  immortal- 
ized the  true  meaning  of  the  situation  as  he  looked  upon 
that  splendid  scene.  He  saw  the  king  with  all  his  court 
about  him;  the  princes  of  the  blood  royal,  a  glittering 
body-guard  behind  him  ;  Necker  and  his  ministers  in 
front  at  the  foot  of  the  dais;  to  right  the  ranked  hie- 
rarchy of  the  Church  ;  to  left  the  representatives  of  the 
nobility  of  France;  in  front  the  sombre  masses  of  the 
Third  Estate.  Comprehending  all  this  with  one  swift 
glance,  Mirabeau  turned  to  certain  of  his  friends,  and 
embracing  the  scene  with  a  gesture,  slightly  pointed  to 
the  king  upon  his  dais,  and  said — very  audibly,  it  would 
seem — "  Behold  the  victim!"  That  was,  indeed,  the  sit- 
uation, though  no  one  but  Mirabeau  guessed  it,  and  even 
Mirabeau  can  scarcely  have  guessed  how  prophetic  he 
was.  Louis  the  King,  in  opening  his  States-General, 
was  in  fact  performing  Hara-Kiri  with  all  conceivable 
pomp  and  all  conceivable  unconsciousness. 

Let  us  glance  for  a  moment  while  Necker  is  pro- 
nouncing his  somewhat  tedious,  terribly  long  -  winded 
discourse  upon  the  sober-coated  gentlemen  of  the  Third 
Estate  who  sat  there  facing  their  king.  They  were 
some  six  hundred  men,  all  attired  alike,  in  accordance 
with  due  etiquette,  all  very  unlike,  when  once  we  forget 
the  coat,  waistcoat,  and  breeches  of  black  cloth,  the  black 
stockings,  the  short  mantle  of  silk  or  stuff,  such  as  the 
legal  were  wont  to  wear  at  court,  the  muslin  cravat,  the 
hat  cocked  at  three  sides  with  neither  band  nor  button, 


1789.  A  WELL-REMEMBERED   MINORITY.  423 

which  royal  rescript  had  endued  them  with.  We  shall 
find  them  all  in  the  triple  columns  of  the  Moniteur,  from 
Afforty,  cultivator  at  Villepinte,  of  the  provostship  and 
viscounty  of  Paris,  to  Wartel,  advocate  of  Lille,  in  the 
bailiwick  of  Lille.  These  two,  the  Alpha  and  the  Ome- 
ga of  the  Third  Estate,  we  shall  not  hear  of  again.  Ag- 
riculturist and  advocate,  they  have  come  here  from  the 
extremes  of  the  alphabet  and  the  extremes  of  France,  to 
do  a  certain  work,  and,  having  done  it,  to  be  speedily 
and  fortunately  forgotten  with  the  majority  of  their  six 
hundred  fellows.  But  there  was  a  minority  not  likely 
to  be  forgotten  so  long  as  men  care  to  remember  any- 
thing. Here  and  there  in  those  sombre  masses  of  the 
Third  Estate,  staring  with  their  eager  curiosity  at  the 
victim  king,  were  men  with  names  then  unknown  or  lit- 
tle known  who  were  by-and-by  to  be  famous,  most  fa- 
mous or  infamous,  according  to  their  several  destinies 
and  degrees. 

Out  of  all  that  six  hundred  present  or  not  pres- 
ent, Time  the  winnower  gleans  only  a  little  handful  of 
names.  After  the  two  most  famous  names  we  must  re- 
member Barnave,  and  Bailly,  learned  among  men,  little 
dreaming  that  a  colleague  from  one  of  the  divisions  of 
Paris  was  occupying  his  busy  brain  with  an  instrument 
of  justice  and  of  injustice  that  should  shear  close.  We 
see  Buzot  and  Petion,  sitting  together  now,  who  shall 
lie  closer  yet  in  the  cold  fields  by-and-by.  We  recall 
Camus  and  Lanjuinais  and  Rabaut-Saint-Etierine,  and 
Mounier  and  Malouet,  and  Rewbell,  and  the  ingenious, 
nimble-witted  Abbe  Sieyes.  We  may  note,  too,  sturdy 
Pere  Gerard  and  M.  Martin  of  Auch,  whom  we  shall 
meet  again.  One  man  we  have  mentioned  already,  the 
Parisian  delegate  whose  busy  brain  was  forging  a  surer 
sword  for  justice,  Dr.  Guillotin.  Of  all  the  men  on  that 


424  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.          CH.  XXVI1L 

"august  and  touching"  occasion,  he — not  indeed,  we 
believe,  bodily  present  owing  to  some  electoral  delay — 
was  the  one  most  to  be  dreaded  by  his  fellows  if  they 
could  have  got  one  sure  glance  into  the  wizard's  glass 
of  the  future.  How  many  heads,  from  the  king  to  the 
Arras  lawyer,  from  pocked  Equality  Orleans  to  Bailly, 
pedantic  Mayor  of  Paris,  were  doomed  to  fall  beneath 
the  grim  machine  with  which  the  name  of  Dr.  Guillotin 
has  been  so  indissolubly  associated  !  It  matters  little 
whether  Guillotin  did  or  did  not  actually  invent  the 
particular  form  of  death  -  dealing  machine  which  has 
borne  his  name  so  long.  He  advocated  expeditious  de- 
capitation ;  the  instrument  which  expeditiously  decapi- 
tated bears  his  name.  Dr.  Louis  may  have  planned  the 
construction  of  the  engine,  but  the  engine  was  called,  is 
called,  will  be  called  the  guillotine.  That  is  enough. 
Inexorable  humor  of  history  !  From  the  crowned  king 
of  the  stately  Capet  line,  proud  representative  of  divine 
right,  to  brilliant  young  Barnave,  no  one  heeded  Guil- 
lotin much,  present  or  absent,  and  yet  Guillotin  was 
their  fate  and  the  fate  of  thousands  more.  Carlyle  has 
written  his  undying  epitaph,  "  his  name  like  to  outlast 
Caesar's." 


1267-1789.  i'ACT  AND  flCTioN.  425 


CHAPTER  XXIX. 

THE    WILD    GABRIEL    HONORS}. 

MOST  Englishmen,  when  they  think  about  Mirabeau, 
think  of  him  and  of  his  stock  and  kin  as  they  stand  on 
Carlyle's  picturesque,  impressive  canvas.  In  his  pre- 
sentation of  Mirabeau  in  the  famous  procession,  and  in 
his  separate  essay  devoted  to  Mirabeau  and  the  Mira- 
beaus,  the  world  is  afforded  a  strongly  marked,  highly 
colored,  eminently  attractive  portrait  and  series  of  por- 
traits. But  if  the  Carlylean  Mirabeau  is  eminently 
picturesque,  if  the  Carlylean  House  of  Mirabeau  takes 
an  historical  dignity  akin  to  that  of  the  House  of  Pe- 
lops,  they  do  not  altogether  stand  the  test  of  modern 
criticism.  Of  the  real  Mirabeau  it  was  almost  impos- 
sible for  Carlyle  at  the  time  when  he  wrote,  except  by 
a  kind  of  magnificent  guess-work,  to  know  much.  Of 
the  "  great  House  of  Mirabeau  "  he  seems  to  have  ac- 
cepted implicitly  the  astonishing  statements  of  the  fam- 
ily and  their  yet  more  astonishing  pretensions.  Not  a 
man  of  the  line,  Riquet  or  Riquety  or  Riquetti,  for  the 
name  is  spelled  all  these  ways  and  even  other  ways  be- 
sides, very  perplexingly,  who  does  not  seem  to  have 
been  bustling,  ambitious,  esurient  of  dignity,  proud  of 
the  grandeur  of  his  race,  with  a  kind  of  blustering  pride 
that  almost  invites  scepticism  by  its  challenging  air  of 
swagger.  In  the  greatest  study  of  the  Mirabeaus  that 
has  yet  been  made,  that  of  Louis  de  Lomenie,  the  Ri- 
quettis  show  to  less  theatrical  advantage.  It  threatened 


426  THE  F&EKCtt  REVOLUTlOiY.  CH.  XXIX. 

to  be  one  of  the  gravest  losses  in  modern  literature 
that  De  Lomenie's  book,  like  the  unfinished  window  in 
Aladdin's  Tower,  "unfinished  must  remain."  Happily 
within  the  last  few  months  the  materials  left  by  Louis 
de  Lomenie  for  the  conclusion  of  the  book  have  been 
admirably  put  together  and  brought  out  by  his  son 
Charles  de  Lomenie. 

The  Mirabeaus  stemmed  from  a  house  of  noble  Ghib- 
ellines  who  during  an  epoch  of  Guelf  supremacy  were 
banished  from  Florence  in  the  middle  of  the  thirteenth 
century.  Such  at  least  is  the  notion  Mirabeau  himself 
strove  to  make  current,  and  succeeded  in  making  cur- 
rent posthumously  in  the  famous  "Vie  de  Jean-Antoine 
de  Riqueti,  Marquis  de  Mirabeau,  et  Notice  sur  sa  Mai- 
son.  Redig6es  par  1'aine  de  ses  Petits  Fils  d'apres  les 
Notes  de  son  Fils."  M.  Lucas  de  Montigny,  who  gave 
this  document  to  the  world  at  the  beginning  of  his 
"Memoires.  de  Mirabeau,"  was  under  the  natural  im- 
pression that  it  was  founded  by  Mirabeau  upon  mere 
notes  jotted  down  by  his  fiery  old  father.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  however,  Mirabeau  was  deceiving  the  world. 
The  life  of  Jean  Antoine  de  Riquetti  was  entirely  by 
his  father,  as  the  discovery  of  the  original  manuscript 
has  since  made  certain.  Mirabeau  merely  copied  it, 
amplifying  it  here  and  there  to  the  greater  glory  of 
the  House  of  Mirabeau,  and  altering  and  softening  the 
archaic  vigor  and  richness  of  the  paternal  prose.  That 
the  elder  Mirabeau  suspected  some  trickery  on  his  son's 
part  is  made  plain  by  M.  de  Lomenie,  who  quotes  a 
letter  from  the  marquis  to  his  brother  the  Bailli,  in 
which  he  expresses  a  fear  that  Mirabeau  has  copied  a 
manuscript  lent  him  for  his  instruction,  and  adds  that 
if  any  copy  comes  before  the  world  it  must  be  through 
the  son. 


1267-178&.  GIIIBELLINE  OR  GUELF?  42? 

In  the  original  manuscript  the  Marquis  de  Mirabeau 
makes  much  of  the  splendor  and  dignity  of  his  race, 
but  their  grandeur  grows  and  swells  under  the  copy- 
ing hand  of  Mirabeau.  The  son  intensifies  terms  of 
grandeur,  interpolates  adjectives  of  greater  stateliness, 
and  in  every  way  endeavors  to  heighten  the  picture 
of  the  ancestral  dignity.  Illustrious  Ghibelline  nobles 
banished  from  Florence,  the  great  house  transferred 
itself  to  Provence,  and  took  rank  at  once  among  the 
loftiest  Proven9al  nobility.  Such  is  the  Mirabeau  con- 
tention ;  but  the  contention,  unfortunately,  does  not 
stand  the  test  of  cold  historic  inquiry.  To  begin  with, 
the  Riquettis  of  Provence  do  not  appear  to  have  made 
up  their  mind  as  to  whether  the  Arrighettis  of  Flor- 
ence were  Ghibelline  or  Guelf,  a  matter  of  some  small 
importance  in  the  history  of  a  stately  house.  There  is 
next  no  existing  proof  of  any  kind  of  the  marriage  of 
Pierre,  the  first  of  the  French  Riquettis,  with  Sibylle 
de  Fos,  "  of  the  house  of  the  Counts  of  Provence,  of 
whom  the  Troubadours  have  sung  the  talents  and  beau- 
ty." A  fragment  of  genealogy  in  the  National  Library 
in  Paris  gives  the  wife  of  the  first  French  Riquetti  as 
Catherine  de  Fossis,  a  name  which  has  no  connection 
whatever  with  the  house  of  the  Counts  of  Provence. 
It  is,  indeed,  as  M.  de  Lomenie  shows,  truly  remarkable 
that  if  the  first  French  Riquetti  was  of  sufficient  stand- 
ing to  wed  the  daughter  of  a  princely  house,  no  men- 
tion whatever  of  his  descendants  should  be  made  for 
two  and  a  half  centuries,  until  the  middle  of  the  six- 
teenth century,  in  any  historical  record,  not  merely  of 
France,  but  of  Provence.  Nor  is  it  less  remarkable 
that  the  first  conspicuous  bearer  of  the  Riquetti  name 
seems  to  have  had  some  difficulty  in  escaping,  by  alleg- 
ing nobility,  the  payment  of  a  tax  levied  only  on  the 


428  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

lowest  classes.  A  strange  drop  in  the  world  indeed  for 
illustrious  Ghibellines — or  Guelfs — wedded  to  ladies  of 
the  princely  lines  of  Provence. 

This  John  Riquetti  of  the  tax  was  the  son  of  an  Ho- 
nore  Riquetti  of  Digne,  who  settled  in  Marseilles  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century.  He  seems  to  have 
engaged  in  commerce  of  some  kind.  His  son  Jehan 
appears  to  have  worked  with  success  in  the  coral  trade, 
and  to  have  founded  besides  a  manufactory  of  scarlet 
stuffs.  He  married  in  1564  a  lady  of  the  old  Provencal 
family  of  Glandeves,  bought  the  house  and  lands  of 
Mirabeau,  and  took  its  name.  Hitherto  the  castle  and 
estate  of  Mirabeau  had  belonged  to  the  Barras  family, 
"li  Barras  viei  coumo  li  roucas" — old  as  the  rocks  they 
were  called  in  Provence.  The  castle  and  lands  passed 
by  marriage  into  the  Glandeves  family,  and  from  Gas- 
pard  de  Glandeves  Jehan  Riquetti,  successful  coral 
merchant  and  manufacturer  of  scarlet  stuffs,  bought  it 
when  he  wedded  a  lady  of  the  line.  It  must  be  admit- 
ted that  in  these  acts  we  see  more  the  ambitious,  push- 
ing, prosperous  coral  merchant  than  the  descendant  of 
illustrious  Florentines  and  of  the  highest  nobility  of 
Provence.  Twenty-one  thousand  crowns  of  forty-eight 
sols  each  was  a  pretty  good  sum  to  pay  for  a  tumble- 
down castle,  so  knocked  about  and  dilapidated  that  it 
was  wholly  uninhabitable.  He  seems  to  have  been  as 
eager  to  bear  the  name  of  Mirabeau  as  Glossin  was  in 
"  Guy  Mannering  "  to  be  called  Ellangowan.  His  am- 
bition brought  him  into  trouble.  Lawsuits  rained  on 
him  for  dues,  the  castle  and  lands  were  even  for  a  sea- 
son sequestrated,  but  Jehan  Riquetti  was  hardy,  and 
fought  pertinaciously,  and  won  his  case  at  last.  In  the 
documents  of  these  various  processes  he  is  alluded  to  as 
a  merchant  of  Marseilles,  and  in  the  final  act  is  called 


1267-1789.  MAKING   A    PEDIGREE.  429 

Lord  of  Mirabeau,  with  no  title  of  nobility  whatever. 
The  second  lawsuit  was  for  payment  of  that  right  of 
Francs  Fiefs  which  was  only  taxable  upon  roturiers 
who  had  acquired  noble  property.  Jehan  stood  out  for 
his  nobility,  and  an  inquiry  into  his  claims  was  set  on 
foot.  The  inquiry  was  held  first  at  Seyne,  the  oldest 
abiding-place  of  the  family,  then  at  Digne.  Various 
persons  testified  in  a  vague  sort  of  way  to  the  nobility 
of  the  family.  The  absolute  absence  of  documentary 
proof  was  accounted  for  by  the  destruction  of  precious 
papers  in  the  turbulent  year  1574.  Dim  memories  of  a 
destroyed  shield  with  a  blazon,  of  a  vanished  portrait, 
of  a  shattered  tomb,  were  offered  in  evidence.  Worthy 
persons  remembered  hearsay  statements  as  to  the  no- 
bility of  the  Riquettis.  All  this  was  not  much  for  a 
family  belonging  to  the  highest  Proven9al  nobility,  but 
it  was  something  in  the  eyes  of  the  commissioners. 
They  accepted  the  kind  of  general  impression  of  nobil- 
ity, acquitted  Jehan  of  the  Francs  Fiefs,  and  Jehan 
styled  himself  ecuyer  thenceforward. 

Thomas  de  Riquetti,  grandson  of  Jehan,  squire  and 
lord  of  Mirabeau,  gave  his  family  another  lift  in  the 
world  by  his  marriage  with  a  daughter  of  the  house  of 
Ponteves.  The  difference  between  the  social  status  of 
the  Riquettis  and  the  lady  of  Ponteves  is  curiously 
marked  in  the  marriage  contract,  in  which  the  simple 
squireship  of  Thomas  of  Riquetti  contrasts  with  the 
pompous  and  swelling  epithets  of  the  people  of  Pon- 
teves. When  this  same  Thomas,  nineteen  years  later, 
in  1639,  wished  to  set  a  younger  son's  name  upon  the 
roll  of  the  Knights  of  Malta,  he  had  to  obtain  what 
was  called  the  secret  proof  of  nobility  in  the  solemn 
declaration  of  four  gentlemen  of  old  stock  that  the  Ri- 
quettis were  a  family  of  the  first  water.  It  is  really 


430  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

curious  and  pathetic  to  note  the  struggles  the  Riquettis 
had  to  keep  up  their  dignity  and  assert  their  nobility. 
Inclusion  in  the  Order  of  Malta  was  a  much-desired 
dignity,  we  may  imagine,  for  the  Riquetti  Mirabeaus. 
There  had  been  Mirabeaus  before  in  the  order,  but  they 
were  Barras-Mirabeaus,  a  very  different  matter.  The 
Riquettis  were  making  their  way,  however,  patiently 
and  perseveringly,  step  by  step.  Thomas's  next  move 
was  to  secure  himself  a  dignified  blazon.  He  had  re- 
course accordingly, not  to  the  official  genealogist,  Charles 
d'Hozier,  who  saw  through  his  pretensions,  but  to  a 
kind  of  swindling  herald,  Jean  Baptiste  1'Hermite  de 
Soliers,  who  turned  him  out  a  genealogy  and  any  num- 
ber of  brilliant  armorial  bearings,  just  in  the  same  way 
that  a  heraldic  stationer  of  to-day  will  supply,  for  a 
consideration,  arms  and  old  descent  to  any  ambitious 
pork-butcher.  This  amazing  rogue  of  a  herald  coolly 
falsified  citations  from  Italian  historians,  and  converted 
genuine  Arrigucci  of  Zazzera's  book  into  Ariqueti.  On 
the  basis  of  this  audacious  swindle  the  great  Mirabeau 
coolly  declared  that  the  only  mesalliance  in  his  family 
was  with  the  Medicis.  In  all  probability  Mirabeau  ac- 
cepted L'Hermite's  work  in  all  sincerity,  but  the  fact 
remains  that  it  was  no  Ariqueti  or  Arrighetti  who  wed- 
ded into  the  Medici  line,  but  one  of  the  Arrigucci,  a 
most  ancient  house  of  Fiesole.  There  did  indeed  turn 
up  a  certain  Count  Giulio  d'Arrighetti  in  the  service  of 
the  Grand  Duke  of  Tuscany,  who,  travelling  in  Mar- 
seilles, was  hailed  with  joy  by  Thomas  de  Riquetti  as 
a  relation,  and  who  seems  to  have  been  good  enough 
to  recognize  the  relationship.  But  as  his  arms  were 
wholly  different  from  the  Riquettis  of  Provence,  and 
different  again  from  those  of  the  genuine  Arrighettis, 
who  are  to  be  found  in  Florence  at  a  much  later  period, 


1267-1789.  NEW   LEGENDS.  431 

however,  than  that  of  their  alleged  banishment,  this 
testimony  only  adds  a  fresh  complication  to  the  inge- 
nious little  family  swindle.  It  was  not,  however,  owing 
to  the  audacity  of  L'Hermite,  or  the  complaisance  of 
Giulio  Arrighetti,  that  Thomas  was  able  to  hold  his  no- 
bility in  1688,  when  Louis  XIV.  ordered  the  verification 
of  titles  of  nobility.  Two  documents  did  this  for  him 
— one  dated  1398,  which  calls  Antoine  Riquetti  "vir 
nobilis  juris  peritus  de  Regio,"  that  is,  of  Riez  ;  and 
another  of  1410,  which  calls  Antoine  Riquetti  "judex 
ciiriae  regiae  civitats  Dignae,"  that  is,  of  Digne.  In  1685, 
Thomas,  who  had  been  a  loyal  king's  man  all  through 
the  Fronde,  received  letters-patent  permitting  him  to 
take  the  title  of  marquis  from  the  estate  of  Mirabeau, 
and  so  for  the  first  time  a  Riquetti  entered  the  ranks 
of  the  high  nobility. 

In  1693  a  new  prop  for  the  great  house  of  Riquetti 
made  its  appearance  in  a  "Nobiliare  de  Provence,"  by 
the  Abbe  Robert  of  Brian£on.  This  book,  dedicated  to 
Jean  Antoine,  second  Marquis  of  Mirabeau,  our  Mira- 
beau's  grandfather,  repeats  most,  if  not  all,  of  L'Her- 
mite's  lies,  invents  the  mysterious  Sibylle  de  Fos,  and 
fills  in  the  foggy  period  of  the  Riquetti  record  with  a 
crowd  of  remarkable  and  purely  imaginary  figures  and 
events.  Against  this  prodigious  performance  a  zealous 
antiquarian,  the  Abbe  Barcilon  of  Mauvans,  immediately 
ran  a-tilt,  especially  assailing  the  imaginary  grandeur 
of  the  Riquettis,  and,  rushing  impetuously  to  the  other 
extreme,  he  brings  forward  a  throng  of  Riquettis  in 
humble  walks  of  life — laborers,  artisans,  and  the  like — 
who  may,  however,  belong  to  those  Riquettis  with  whom 
our  Riquettis  always  sought  to  disassociate  themselves. 
It  is  certain,  however,  that  Barcilon  quotes  the  act  of 
marriage  of  Houore  Riquetti  in  1515,  which,  if  genuine, 


432  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

proves  that  instead  of  the  nuptials  between  a  lord  of 
Sieves  and  the  daughter  of  a  lord  De  la  Garde  of  the 
"Nobilier  de  Provence,"  a  simple  schoolmaster  of  Digne 
married  the  daughter  of  a  tailor  of  Marseilles. 

But  the  final  support  of  the  glory  of  the  Riquetti  line 
is  in  Louis  d'Hozier's  "  Armorial  de  France,"  in  the  vol- 
ume of  1764.  Here  we  have  an  Azzuccius  Arrighetti, 
banished  from  Florence  in  1267  or  1268  as  a  Ghibelline, 
and  assumed  to  be  the  father  of  Pierre  Riquetti,  who 
died  in  Seyne  in  Provence  in  the  middle  of  the  four- 
teenth century.  Here  all  the  older  assertions  of  the 
Riquettis  are  completely  upset.  The  Pietro  Ariqueti, 
who  was  a  Guelf  banished  from  Florence,  becomes  Az- 
zuccius Arrighetti  banished  as  a  Ghibelline.  Moreover, 
there  is  not  the  slightest  proof  that  Azzuccius  Arri- 
ghetti was  the  father  of  Pierre  Riquetti  beyond  the 
assumption,  unsupported  by  any  documentary  evidence, 
of  an  Abbe  Octavien  de  Buon-accorsi  and  a  Father  Sol- 
dani,  whom  Louis  d'Hozier  cites.  Truly  the  whole  busi- 
ness is  an  amazing  muddle,  a  veritable  genealogistic 
Slough  of  Despond,  in  which  we  flounder  despairingly. 
The  tissue  of  lies  which  the  Riquettis  and  their  friends 
built  up,  generation  after  generation,  not  only  do  not 
stand  separate  tests,  but  do  not  hold  together  at  all. 
The  account  of  one  friend  differs  from  the  account  of 
another  friend.  The  Biblical  genealogies  are  less  per- 
plexing, are  easier  to  reconcile,  than  the  astonishing  as- 
sumptions, assertions,  and  fabrications  of  the  ambitious 
Riquettis.  M.  de  Lomenie  took  a  world  of  pains  to  get 
at  the  truth.  He  sought  and  sought  in  vain  for  the 
decree  of  banishment.  It  seems  as  certain  as  anything 
well  can  be  that  in  1267  the  triumphant  Guelfs  issued 
no  decree  of  banishment  against  the  Ghibellines.  The 
name  of  Arrighetti  does  not  occur  in  the  lists  of  im- 


1267-1789.  RIQUETTIS  AND   MIRABEAUS.  433 

portant  families  of  the  two  parties  drawn  up  by  Machia- 
velli  or  Villani,  nor  in  the  "Nobiliaire  Florentin"  of 
Scipione  Amrairato,  nor  in  Zazzera's  "Nobiliaire  Ital- 
ien,"  nor  in  Paolo  Mini,  nor  in  Litta.  There  is  indeed 
a  document,  a  "Priorista,"  in  the  National  Library,  in 
which  eleven  Arrighetti  figure  as  having  been  succes- 
sively Priors  in  the  Corporation  of  Woodcutters.  This 
fact  would  not  interfere  with  their  nobility,  but  merely 
would  imply  that  they  were  at  the  head  of  one  of  the 
twelve  trade  bodies.  But  these  Arrighetti  belong  to 
1367,  a  century  later  than  the  alleged  banishment  of 
the  whole  family.  Their  arms,  too,  are  different  from 
those  described  in  the  Seyne  inquiry  as  belonging  to 
Pierre  Riquetti,  and  from  those  of  the  complaisant 
Giulio  of  the  seventeenth  century. 

Perhaps  the  most  curious  part  of  all  this  amazing 
story  is  that  the  time  came  when  these  very  dubiously 
noble  Riquettis  were  called  upon  to  give  their  aid  in 
bolstering  up  a  family  of  the  Riquets.  In  1666  a  Riquet, 
family  of  Languedoc  who  had  been  in  obscurity,  and 
who  now  became  distinguished  by  the  enterprise  of  the 
canal  of  the  two  seas,  made  rapid  progress  in  wealth 
and  honors  and  gained  first  the  countship  and  later  the 
marquisate  of  Caraman.  By  a  curious  chance  it  came 
about  that  in  the  eighteenth  century  the  Marquis  of 
Caraman  found  that  it  would  be  advantageous  for  him 
to  seek  relations  with  the  Riquettis  of  Provence,  the 
Mirabeaus.  They  had  succeeded  in  inscribing  their 
name  in  the  Order  of  the  Knights  of  Malta.  The  Count 
of  Caraman  wished  to  get  his  younger  sons  on  the  roll, 
and  in  order  to  do  this  he  sought  to  give  a  more  ancient 
lustre  to  the  firebrand  newness  of  his  nobility  by  at- 
taching himself  to  the  Riquetti  Mirabeaus,  and  so  plead- 
ing precedence  for  one  of  the  Riquetti  kin  in  the  order, 
I.— 23 


434  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cu.  XXIX. 

The  then  Marquis  of  Mirabeau  accepted  the  relation- 
ship graciously,  much  as  Giulio  the  Complaisant  had 
accepted  his  ancestor  ;  but  in  spite  of  the  amiable  fraud 
they  never  forgot  or  allowed  others  to  forget  that  the 
Riquetti  Mirabeaus  were  a  very  different  order  of  be- 
ings from  the  Riquets  of  Caraman.  Was  there  ever  in 
the  history  of  man  a  more  curious  example  of  one  family 
of  sham  grandeur  backing  up  its  pretensions  by  the  aid 
of  another  family  whose  sham  grandeur  was  furbished 
forth  a  little  earlier  ?  There  seems  to  have  been  some- 
thing in  the  very  name  of  Riquet  or  Riquetti  which 
awoke  in  its  wearers  a  mean  and  eager  hunger  for  a 
splendor  and  an  ancestry  not  their  own,  a  craving  after 
titles,  honors,  and  the  glitter  of  sham  genealogies.  In 
all  probability  Riquets  and  Riquettis  alike  were  French 
of  origin  and  of  no  great  beginnings.  The  wild  tem- 
pestuousness  of  the  race  which  is  supposed  to  point  to 
an  Italian  origin  is  not  more  characteristic  of  Italy  than 
of  Provence. 

As  for  that  magnificent  example  of  the  earlier  and 
stormier  Riquettis,  the  mad  knight  who  chained  the 
two  mountains  together  in  some  such  fit  of  fiery  humor 
as  led  the  hysterically  feminine  Xerxes  to  scourge  the 
raging  waves  of  the  sea,  he  must,  it  is  to  be  feared,  be 
dismissed  bodily  from  the  great  Riquetti  mythos.  Mr. 
Oarlyle,  as  was  natural,  loved  this  wild  Titantic  ances- 
tral Riquetti  and  made  much  of  him,  and  deduced  char- 
acteristics of  the  race  from  his  fierce  spleens.  But  it 
seems  certain,  as  far  as  anything  is  certain  in  the  Ri- 
quetti muddle,  that  the  famous  chain,  with  its  star  of 
five  rays  in  the  centre,  has  naught  to  do  with  Mirabeaus 
or  Riquetti.  The  chain,  if  it  ever  existed  at  all — and 
its  existence  seems  scarcely  more  certain  than  of  the 
chain  which  bound  Andromeda  and  some  links  whereof 


1267-1789.     LOUIS  XIV.  AND  THE  MAD  MIRABEAU.  435 

were  still  visible,  says  Herodotus,  in  his  time — belongs 
not  to  any  Mirabeau,  but  to  a  Blacas.  Old  Marquis 
Mirabeau,  in  telling  this  tale,  admitted  its  highly  myth- 
ical and  problematic  character,  but  Mirabeau,  the  Mira- 
beau, judiciously  editing  his  father's  simpler  honesty, 
omits  the  qualification  and  converts  a  Riquetti  as  leg- 
endary as  Amadis  or  Gawain  into  an  undoubted  four- 
teenth-century ancestor  of  tempestuous  passions  be- 
coming to  one  of  a  great  race.  Vanity  was  the  strong- 
est passion  in  the  Riquetti  race,  and  that  seems  to  be 
the  quality  of  all  others  which  our  Mirabeau  derived 
most  largely  from  his  predecessors. 

One  of  the  Mirabeaus,  and  one  alone,  succeeded  in 
attaining  the  slightest  notoriety  outside  the  limits  of 
Provence  before  the  eighteenth  century.  This  was 
Bruno  de  Riquetti,  a  captain  in  the  French  Guards, 
who  appears  to  have  been  a  hot-blooded,  tempestuous 
kind  of  person,  with  little  or  nothing  of  the  courtier  in 
his  composition,  and  a  great  deal  of  the  reckless  dare- 
devil. We  hear  of  his  batooning  some  offensive  usher 
in  the  very  cabinet  of  the  king,  coolly  ignoring  the  royal 
order  for  his  arrest,  and  swaggering  with  broad  audacity 
into  the  monarch's  presence.  Louis  XIV.  had  always  a 
liking  for  a  soldierly  quality,  and  he  forgave  the  mad 
Mirabeau.  The  mad  Mirabeau  is  more  celebrated  still 
for  another  example  of  canteen  insolence.  A  stately 
ceremonial  had  been  organized  by  the  Duke  de  la  Feuil- 
lade  in  honor  of  the  equestrian  statue  of  the  king  in  the 
Place  of  Victories,  and  in  this  ceremony  mad  Mirabeau 
bore  his  part,  chafingly,  no  doubt,  at  the  head  of  his 
company  of  Guards.  Riding  away  afterwards  with  his 
Guai'ds,  he  passed  the  statue  of  Henri  IV.  on  the  Pont 
Neuf,  whereupon,  turning  to  his  soldiers,  he  roared  in 
the  big  Bruno  voice,  "  Friends,  let  us  salute  this  fellow; 


436  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XXIX. 

he  is  as  good  as  another,"  and  so  rode  clattering  on, 
leaving  his  audacity  to  be  the  scandal  and  delight  of 
courtly  chroniclers.  He  was  altogether  the  sort  of  man 
whom  we  may  imagine  M.  d'Artagnan,  of  his  Majesty's 
Musketeers,  would  have  found  by  no  means  bad  com- 
pany. 

Bluff  Bruno  apart,  John  Anthony  is  the  first  of  the 
Mirabeaus  who  occupies  any  serious  place  in  history. 
His  son,  the  old  marquis  and  friend  of  man,  wrote  a  life 
of  him,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  the  grandson,  the  great 
Gabriel  Honore,  got  hold  of,  and  copied  out  with  altera- 
tions and  amplifications,  intending  to  pass  it  off,  and 
succeeding,  posthumously,  in  passing  off,  as  his  own. 
Thanks  to  M.  de  Lomenie,  we  know  what  old  Marquis 
Mirabeau  wrote,  denuded  of  the  interpolations  and  ad- 
ditions of  the  tribune.  John  Anthony  was  a  remarkable 
man,  and  it  is  curious  that  he  has  left  so  little  impres- 
sion upon  his  time.  A  distinguished  soldier,  his  name 
figures  in  few  of  the  "  Memoires,"  few  of  the  military 
chronicles  of  the  age  in  which  he  lived  and  battled. 
Saint-Simon,  the  only  one  who  mentions  him  at  all,  men- 
tions him  passingly  and  inaccurately,  in  connection,  be 
it  noted,  with  that  very  Cassano  fight  in  which,  accord- 
ing to  his  son  and  biographer,  he  played  the  most  con- 
spicuous and  brilliant  part.  The  probability  is  that 
John  Anthony  was  a  good  and  gallant  soldier  in  an  age 
of  good  and  gallant  soldiers  ;  that  his  deeds,  not  suffi- 
ciently remarkable  in  such  a  warlike  epoch  to  earn  him 
any  exceptional  fame,  loomed  out  enormous  in  the  eyes 
of  Mirabeau,  always  eager  in  family  glorification,  and 
that  this  is  the  explanation  of  the  fact  that  the  living 
Mars  of  the  marquis's  memoir  only  obtains  the  honor  of 
a  misspelled  reference  in  the  record  of  Saint-Simon. 

This  casual  and  inaccurate  mention  is  made  all  the 


1666-1737.  JOHX   ANTHONY.  437 

more  remarkable  when  it  is  contrasted  with  the  glowing 
account  which  the  old  marquis  gives  of  the  part  his  sire 
played  on  that  memorable  day.  The  Mirabeau  muse  of 
history,  always  ready  on  the  least  possible  prompting  to 
sing  the  deeds  of  her  heroes  in  the  bombastically  epic 
vein,  here  surpasses  herself.  According  to  the  story  of 
the  marquis,  John  Anthony  was  the  hero  of  Cassano 
fight,  where  he  played  a  part  akin  to  that  of  some  Titan 
of  old  time,  some  Roland  at  Roncesvalles,  some  Grettir 
at  Drangey.  He  alone  offered  his  colossal  form  to  the 
pikes,  the  bullets,  and  the  sabres  of  an  overwhelming 
force.  He  was  struck  down  with  a  hundred  wounds, 
the  least  a  death  to  nature — indeed,  the  old  marquis, 
with  a  calm  indifference  to  scientific  possibilities  un- 
worthy of  such  a  hero,  declares  that  his  jugular  was 
severed  by  a  shot — and  the  greater  part  of  an  army 
charged  full  tilt  over  his  ruined  body.  A  faithful 
henchman,  pausing  from  the  charge,  flung  an  iron  pot 
over  his  master's  head — it  was  all  he  could  do — and 
galloped  on,  leaving  John  Anthony  to  his  fate.  The 
iron  pot  saved  him.  The  hoofs  and  the  heels  of  Prince 
Eugene's  horse  and  foot  rattled  over  it  in  vain.  When 
the  fight  was  done  the  body  was  still  found  to  have 
some  signs  of  life.  Vendome  wailed  for  John  Anthony 
as  Priam  wailed  for  Hector.  "Ah,  Mirabeau  is  dead!" 
he  exclaimed — in  the  narrative  of  Mirabeau  the  tribune 
— as  if  Cassano  fight  had  no  other  result  than  that.  But 
Mirabeau  was  not  dead.  Prince  Eugene,  eminently  the 
"  edle  Ritter,"  had  the  body  picked  up,  and  finding  it 
animate,  like  a  more  courteous  Achilles,  sent  it  back  to 
Vendome's  camp,  to  Vendome's  delight,  unrecorded  by 
other  history  tlian  that  of  the  Mirabeaus.  John  An- 
thony recovered,  had  himself  patched  together,  bound 
up  his  marred  and  mangled  neck  in  a  stock  of  silver, 


438  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIX. 

and  coolly  faced  the  world  again.  There  is  a  certain 
hero  of  French  fiction,  a  Captain  Castagnette,  a  myth- 
ical hero  of  the  Napoleonic  wars,  who  gets  knocked  to 
pieces,  and  has  gradually  to  replace  every  portion  of  his 
shattered  body  with  some  foreign  substance,  who  would 
almost  seem  to  be  an  exaggerated  reminiscence  of  John 
Anthony  "  Col  d' Argent."  We  may  well  pardon  John 
Anthony  the  harmless  pleasure  he  took  in  alluding  to 
Cassano  fight  as  "  the  little  affair  in  which  I  was  killed." 
For  surely  no  man  in  history  or  fiction  came  to  such 
close  quarters  with  destiny  before  and  got  off,  on  the 
whole,  so  well.  If  he  was  a  stout  soldier,  he  was  a  poor 
courtier,  as  poor  as  mad  Bruno  himself.  When  Ven- 
dome  presented  him  to  the  king  all  John  Anthony  could 
find  appropriate  to  say  was,  "Sire,  if  I  had  left  my  flag 
to  come  to  court  and  bribe  some  strumpet,  I  should  harve 
had  more  advancement  and  fewer  wounds."  Louis  dis- 
creetly pretended  not  to  hear,  and  Vendome  hurried  his 
unruly  favorite  away,  saying,  "Henceforward  I  will 
present  you  to  the  enemy  only,  and  never  to  the  king," 
which,  on  the  whole,  was  perhaps  the  most  prudent 
course  for  all  concerned. 

In  his  youth  John  Anthony  must  have  been  singularly 
handsome,  and  the  description  of  the  portrait  of  him 
which  still  exists  in  the  Castle  of  Mirabeau  somehow 
suggests  the  Aramis  of  Dumas's  immortal  quadrilateral. 
He  had,  we  learn,  a  charming  face,  which,  though  ex- 
ceedingly animated,  did  not  suggest  the  stern  vigor 
which  showed  itself  in  the  brave  squares  of  war,  and 
which  his  children  so  well  remembered.  The  great  blue 
eyes  are  full  of  sweetness,  and  the  young  musketeer's 
beauty  is  qualified  as  almost  feminine.  Our  dear  Ara- 
mis was  just  such  a  musketeer,  and  it  is  hard  to  think 
that  Dumas  had  not  John  Anthony  in  his  mind  when 


1695-1769.  FRANgOlSE  DE  CASTELLANE.  439 

he  gave  some  touches  to  more  than  one  of  his  heroes. 
Though  this  delicate  beauty  must  have  been  consider- 
ably impaired  by  the  bustle  and  scuffle  of  Cassano  fight, 
it  did  not  make  John  Anthony  less  attractive  to  woman. 
While  taking  rest  at  the  waters  of  Digne  with  his  forty- 
two  years,  his  broken  arm,  his  silver  neck,  and  his  body 
honeycombed  with  wounds,  he  met  a  certain  Mademoi- 
selle de  Castellane  -  Norante,  beautiful,  wealthy,  high- 
born, wooed  her  and  won  her  and  wedded  her,  and  she 
bore  him  six  children.  The  eccentricity  of  the  bat- 
tered musketeer  comes  out  strongly  in  this  marriage. 
Not  in  choosing  a  young  and  beautiful  girl — for,  though 
he  is  said  to  have  been  jealous,  his  strong  left  arm  was 
as  terrible  as  ever  his  right  had  been — but  because  of 
the  extraordinary  preliminaries  and  conditions  of  the 
marriage.  First,  he  wanted  the  young  lady  to  marry 
secretly,  and  when  she  refused  this  he  tabled  a  series  of 
conditions  for  her  family  to  obey.  She  was  to  come  to 
her  husband  in  garments  which  he  had  prepared  for  her, 
taking  nothing,  not  even  hei  linen,  from  her  home;  and 
he  further  stipulated,  and  "  that  peremptorie,"  as  Du- 
gald  Dalgetty  would  say,  that  her  mother  should  never 
put  her  foot  inside  her  daughter's  new  home.  This  was 
certainly  anticipating  the  advances  of  a  mother-in-law 
with  a  vengeance.  It  seems,  however,  certain  that  John 
Anthony  did,  after  all,  consent  to  wed  his  wife  encum- 
bered with  her  worldly  gear  to  a  very  considerable 
amount  of  property,  and  that  he  showed  himself  a  more 
business-like  and  less  disinterested  person  than  his  son 
and  grandson  would  have  had  the  world  believe.  How- 
ever all  that  may  be,  the  marriage  seems  to  have  been 
a  happy  one,  as  it  was  a  fruitful  one.  It  lasted  some 
twenty  -  nine  years.  The  shattered  old  warrior  died, 
thanking  Heaven  that  it  spared  him  from  a  sudden 


440  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXlX. 

death,  and  allowed  him  to  meet  his  end  in  tranquillity 
and  composure.  Of  his  six  children,  five  sons  and  a 
girl,  only  three  sons  survived  him. 

John  Anthony  left  three  sons,  as  we  have  seen :  the 
eldest,  whom  we  know  as  the  Marquis  of  Mirabeau;  the 
second,  Jean  Anthony  Joseph  Charles  Elzear  de  Ri- 
quetti,  whom  we  know  as  the  Bailli;  and  the  third,  Louis 
Alexander,  of  whom  history  takes  little  heed.  The  last 
may  be  set  aside  in  a  few  words.  He  was  not  his  moth- 
er's favorite.  He  was  neither  the  handsomest  nor  the 
wisest  of  his  family.  Yet  he  was  good-looking  enough, 
and  M.  de  Lomenie  hits  him  off  happily  as  the  type 
of  a  gentleman  of  the  eighteenth-century  comedy.  He 
was  in  the  Order  of  Malta  like  his  brothers;  he  was  a 
soldier,  and  did  his  devoir  gallantly,  but  his  head  and 
heart  were  not  of  the  strongest.  He  got  entangled  at 
Brussels  in  the  lures  of  an  adventuress,  half  actress,  half 
harlot,  a  Mademoiselle  Navarre,  who  was  one  of  the 
many  mistresses  of  Marshal  Saxe.  She  was  the  mis- 
tress of  Marmontel  also,  and  that  meanly  voluptuous 
moralist  was  just  screwing  his  resolution  to  the  point 
of  asking  the  adventuress  to  marry  him  when  young 
Mirabeau  stepped  in  and  carried  off  the  poor  prize.  The 
Mirabeau  family  were  furious,  strove  to  move  heaven 
and  earth  against  the  marriage  before  and  after  it  was 
accomplished;  their  efforts  were  suddenly  ended  by  the 
death  of  the  new  Countess  of  Mirabeau  at  Avignon  in 
1749.  Louis  Alexander,  renounced  by  his  family,  and 
at  his  wit's  end  and  his  purse's  end,  was  suddenly  taken 
up  by  the  Margrave  of  Bayreuth  and  his  wife.  He  went 
with  them  to  Italy.  He  accompanied  them  to  Bayreuth. 
He  rose  in  honor  and  dignity  at  the  little  German  court, 
played  a  part  in  Franco-German  diplomacy,  and  married 
a  Julia  Dorothea  Sylvia  of  Kunsberg,  a  young  German 


1*715-89.  JOHN  ANTHONY'S  SONS.  441 

girl  of  rank.  He  became  reconciled  to  his  brothers,  and 
at  last  to  his  mother.  Then  in  the  high  tide  of  prosper- 
ity and  felicity  he  was  struck  down  by  disease,  and  died 
at  Bayreuth  in  the  autumn  of  1761.  His  widow,  who 
had  won  all  the  Mirabeau  hearts,  came  at  their  urgent 
request  to  take  her  home  with  them,  and  the  marquis 
seems  never  to  tire  of  singing  her  praises. 

The  Bailli  Mirabeau  may  be  summed  up  as  a  good 
sailor,  a  bad  courtier,  a  gallant  gentleman,  an  illustrious 
ornament  of  the  waning  Order  of  Malta,  and  an  ideal 
brother.  His  affection  for  his  brother  the  marquis  knew 
no  bounds,  and  their  sympathetic  intimacy  is  one  of  the 
most  pleasing  episodes  in  the  history  of  their  house,  and 
indeed  in  the  history  of  the  century.  They  never  quar- 
relled, they  seldom  disagreed;  even  when  Gabriel  Ho- 
nore  set  his  wits  to  work  he  could  not  set  them  at  odds. 
As  a  sailor  he  fought  the  English  time  and  again ;  now 
defeated,  wounded,  and  a  prisoner  in  England;  now  de- 
feating, as  in  the  affair  at  Saint-Vaast.  As  he  battled 
with  the  English,  so  he  battled  with  the  bureaucracy  at 
the  Admiralty,  striving,  in  a  shower  of  pamphlets,  after 
all  manner  of  reforms.  As  a  governor  of  Guadeloupe 
he  distinguished  himself  by  his  sympathies  with  the 
native,  as  opposed  to  the  planter  classes,  a  policy  which 
had  its  usual  effect  of  making  him  highly  unpopular 
with  the  privileged  order.  He  took  the  final  vows  at 
Malta,  and  rose  to  high  distinction  in  the  fading  order, 
regretting  gravely  that  there  were  no  Turks  to  fight. 
For  his  brother's  sake  he  left  Malta,  and  came  home  to 
live  with  him. 

Few  historical  characters  have  been  more  harshly  en- 
treated than  old  Marquis  Mirabeau,  the  "  Friend  of 
Man."  Sneering  critics  have  alluded  to  him  as  the 
Friend  of  Man  who  was  the  enemy  of  his  son.  He  has 


440  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

been  held  up  as  an  example  of  crabbed  dogmatism.  He 
has  been  reviled  because  he  did  not  appreciate  the  dete- 
rioration and  decay  of  the  stately  manners  of  the  French 
nobility.  His  attitude  towards  his  tempestuous  son  can 
be  best  understood  by  comparing  it  with  his  relations 
to  his  own  father.  His  horror  at  the  disregard  of  eti- 
quette, which  made  him  growl  at  Marie  Antoinette  run- 
ning about  in  the  short  skirts  of  a  stage  peasant,  was 
natural  in  a  man  whose  sire  represented  the  formality 
of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.  For  the  rest,  if  he  was  dog- 
ged, obstinate,  stubborn,  it  is  hard  to  imagine  how  he 
could  very  well  have  been  anything  else,  sprung  from 
such  a  sire  and  such  a  dame.  Victor  de  Riquetti  was 
born  on  October  4,  1715.  It  was  a  stormy  year  and  a 
stormy  season.  Bolingbroke  had  just  arrived  in  Paris, 
an  attainted  peer,  flying  for  his  life.  James  Stuart  was 
about  to  set  forth  on  that  expedition  which  came  for  a 
moment  near  to  placing  the  crown  of  England  on  the 
head  of  a  Stuart  prince.  The  life  that  had  just  begun 
was  destined  to  have  a  good  deal  of  experience  of  ruined 
royal  houses. 

The  young  Victor  was  received  in  his  childhood  into 
the  knighthood  of  Malta.  It  must  be  admitted  that  his 
education  was  of  the  Spartan  kind.  To  the  curious  in 
the  effects  of  education  upon  character  it  is  intei-esting 
to  contrast  the  method  of  John  Anthony  de  Riquetti 
with  the  method  of  Pierre  Eyquem,  and  to  note  the  re- 
sult of  each  method  in  Victor  of  Mirabeau  and  Michael 
of  Montaigne,  in  the  author  of  "  L'Ami  des  Hommes  " 
and  the  author  of  the  "  Essais."  Two  wholly  distinct 
schools  of  education  are  represented  in  the  story  of 
these  two  sires  and  their  sons.  Pierre  Eyquem  may  be 
said  in  some  degree  to  have  anticipated  the  method  of 
"  Levana,"  and  to  have  adopted  beforehand  the  views 


1715-89.  THE   EDUCATION  OF  VICTOR.  443 

of  Jean  Paul  Richter  on  the  education  of  children. 
The  result  was  the  formation  of  one  of  the  most  lovable 
of  natures.  That  education  left  in  the  mind  of  Michael 
of  Montaigne  the  tenderest  affection  for  the  father  who 
reared  him.  The  educational  system  of  John  Anthony 
was  wide  as  the  poles  asunder  from  the  method  of 
Eyquem.  He  held  it  as  his  cardinal  belief  that  all  dis- 
play of  sentiment  or  of  familiarity  between  parents  and 
children  should  be  rigidly  abolished.  The  business  of 
John  Anthony  and  his  wife  was  always  to  keep  up 
what  we  may  well  call  a  masquerade  of  superiority  to 
all  the  weakness  of  humanity  in  the  eyes  of  their  off- 
spring. It  would  be  hard  to  expect  a  son  who  had  seen 
his  parents  after  the  loss  of  a  child  go  about  with  an 
air  of  "  full  and  entire  serenity  "  to  extend  any  great 
degree  of  sentimental  emotion  towards  his  own  children. 
The  chief  emotion  which  John  Anthony  aroused  in  his 
children  was  fear.  He  seems  to  have  interpreted  the 
duty  of  a  parent  towards  his  family  much  as  a  lion- 
tamer  interprets  his  duty  towards  the  wild  beasts  under 
his  control.  So  long  as  they  are  kept  in  subjugation 
by  fear,  all  is  well.  Even  at  a  great  distance  from  his 
austere  sire,  the  terror  of  his  influence  held  the  young 
Victor  in  check,  and  he  himself  records  the  fact  that  as 
his  mother  was  accustomed  to  write  his  father's  letters, 
and  as  he  was  always  afraid  of  his  father's  letters,  he 
could  never,  all  through  his  life,  open  a  note  from  his 
mother  without  a  beating  heart.  Yet  he  had  no  such 
Spartan  dread  of  his  mother.  For  her  from  the  earliest 
days  he  seems  to  have  cherished  the  liveliest  affection. 
When  Victor  was~five  years  old  a  strange  and  terrible 
plague  swept  across  Provence.  The  great  seaport  of 
Marseilles  was  panic-stricken  and  deserted.  Fugitives 
from  Marseilles  came  swarming  into  Mirabeau's  village. 


444  THE  FRENCH  KEVOLtJTlOtf.  CH.  XXIX. 

Francoise  de  Mirabeau  insisted  upon  leaving  the  plague- 
threatened  place  with  her  husband  and  children.  So 
one  of  Victor  Mirabeau's  earliest  recollections  was  of 
the  family  flight  across  the  mountains  to  the  town  of 
Gap,  which  they  found  in  wild  disorder.  At  first  entry 
was  refused  to  the  fugitives  from  Mirabeau,  but  John 
Anthony  of  the  Silver  Neck  was  not  a  man  to  be  trifled 
with.  He  practically  took  the  town  by  storm,  forced  his 
way  in,  assumed  command  at  once,  and  in  twenty-four 
hours  had  completely  restored  it  to  order  and  tranquillity. 

Victor  and  his  brother  the  Bailli  were  educated  chief- 
ly in  a  Jesuit  college  either  at  Aix  or  Marseilles.  Their 
schooling  was,  of  necessity,  brief.  The  younger  entered 
the  navy  at  twelve  and  a  half.  The  elder,  Victor,  was 
attached  at  thirteen  to  the  regiment  of  Duras,  which 
his  father  had  so  long  commanded.  The  father  sent 
him  off  to  the  army  with  a  characteristic  affectation  of 
Roman  austerity.  When  the  son  waited  upon  the  sire 
to  say  farewell,  John  Anthony,  finding  that  the  carriage 
had  not  yet  come,  and  unwilling  to  waste  any  time  in 
sentimcntalisms,  made  Victor  take  up  a  book  that  was 
being  read  to  him,  and  continue  the  reading  until  the 
carriage  came.  Then  it  was  simply  "  Good-bye,  my 
son  ;  be  wise  if  you  wish  to  be  happy."  And  so,  with 
no  other  or  tenderer  words  ringing  in  his  ears,  the  son 
turned  upon  his  heel  and  went  to  face  the  world. 

The  educational  theory  of  John  Anthony  was  rich 
in  maxims.  Two  of  his  favorite  counsels  to  his  son 
were,  never  to  loot  an  enemy  and  never  to  expose  him- 
self from  mere  foolhardiness.  On  matters  of  etiquette 
he  was  a  precisian  and  a  martinet.  Once  the  young 
soldier  appeared  before  him  at  Aix  in  his  uniform. 
"  Sir,"  said  the  indignant  John  Anthony,  "  when  we 
come  before  people  whom  we  respect  we  take  off  our 


1715-89.  A  STORMY   YOUTH.  445 

corporal's  coat.  A  corporal  appears  nowhere  save  at 
the  head  of  his  men.  Go  and  take  it  off."  The  Friend 
of  Man,  recording  this,  wonders  what  his  father  would 
have  thought  of  an  age  in  which  generals  and  even 
marshals  of  France  wore  uniforms. 

The  youth  of  Victor  Mirabeau  was  sufficiently  stormy. 
In  1731  he  was  withdrawn  for  a  time  from  his  regiment 
to  enter  a  military  academy  in  Paris,  and  the  life  of  the 
young  academician  was  sufficiently  turbulent.  By  quiet- 
ly suppressing  a  letter  from  his  father  he  exempted 
himself  from  submission  to  the  authority  his  father 
wished  him  to  obey,  and  gave  himself  up  to  a  riotous 
enjoyment  of  the  capital.  There  is  something  of  Tom 
and  Jerry,  something  of  the  mad  escapades  of  Lever's 
heroes,  in  the  record  of  the  young  soldier's  Paris  life. 
Play,  debauch,  quarrels,  laid  their  usual  tax  upon  light- 
hearted  youth.  But  what  Victor  seems  to  have  liked 
best  of  all  was  to  frequent  the  playhouse  with  his  wild 
companions,  and  interrupt  the  progress  of  the  piece  by 
all  manner  of  mad  buffooneries.  We  have  an  amusing 
picture  of  the  reckless  lads  shouting  songs  in  their  soft 
Proven9al  and  Languedocian  dialects  in  order  to  silence 
the  orchestra,  and  clamoring  loudly  for  some  other  play 
than  the  one  which  happened  to  be  the  piece  of  the 
evening.  Soldiers  were  called  in  to  repress  the  tumult, 
and  were  promptly  driven  out  again  by  the  rioters. 
The  actors  were  shouted  and  howled  into  silence.  The 
audience  laughed  and  fumed  alternately.  At  last  peace 
was  restored  at  the  direct  request  of  a  princess  of  the 
blood  royal,  the  Duchess  de  Bourbon,  who  sent  to  de- 
mand an  interview  with  the  leaders  of  the  riot.  She 
saw  Victor  Mirabeau  and  a  musketeer  named  Ducrest, 
and  persuaded  them  to  extend  a  gracious  forgiveness  to 
the  unlucky  mummers. 


446  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

All  this  playhouse-haunting  had  its  inevitable  result 
upon  Victor.  The  bright  eyes  of  a  pretty  actress  set 
fire  to  his  boy's  heart.  Perhaps  at  no  time  has  the 
stage  been  more  successful  in  its  attractions  than  in  the 
eighteenth  century.  The  fair  playing- women  were  wor- 
shipped with  a  kind  of  desperate  gallantry  in  which 
mere  passion  was  blended  with  a  semi-chivalrous  poetry 
which  makes  the  stage  loves  of  the  Old  Order  eminent- 
ly picturesque.  Of  all  the  pretty  women  whose  names 
are  preserved  for  us  in  the  amorous  chronicles  of  the 
day,  few  were  prettier  than  the  little  Dangeville,  and 
her  charm,  in  the  Shakespearean  phrase,  overlooked  the 
young  Mirabeau.  The  young  fellow  seems  to  have 
been  very  seriously  in  love,  for,  though  he  had  not  a 
penny  in  his  pocket,  he  won  La  Dangeville's  heart  with 
words,  and  was  for  a  sweet  season  wildly,  madly  happy. 
But  the  happiness  was  of  brief  duration.  John  An- 
thony of  the  Silver  Neck  seems  to  have  heard  of  it. 
There  came  to  the  young  Mirabeau  a  captaincy  in  his 
regiment  of  Duras,  and  orders  to  join  it  immediately. 
Young  Mirabeau  set  off  with  a  breaking  heart.  The 
farewell  between  him  and  his  flame  was  almost  tragic, 
and  the  vows  of  mutual  fidelity  were  deeply  sworn. 
However,  the  young  soldier  soon  heard  that  La  Dange- 
ville had  allied  herself  with  a  wealthy  nobleman,  whom 
she  soon  ruined,  and  so  he  says  that  his  heartache  was 
completely  cured,  and  that  he  forgot  all  about  her, 
which  we  may  be  permitted  to  doubt. 

Victor's  stage  love  was  happier  in  its  beginning  and 
its  ending  than  his  more  regular  alliance  with  Made- 
moiselle de  Vassan.  In  1743,  being  in  Paris  on  certain 
military  business,  the  idea  seems  to  have  occurred  to  him 
that  it  would  be  a  good  thing  to  marry.  He  was  eight- 
and-twenty  then,  but  for  so  young  a  man  he  seems-  to 


1769.  A   SAD   STORY.  447 

have  acted  with  the  chill  composure  of  a  more  than 
eccentric  Stoic.  He  seems  to  have  pitched  upon  Made- 
moiselle de  Vassan  as  his  future  wife  in  a  most  casual 
manner,  chiefly  in  consequence  of  the  good  opinion, 
founded  upon  hearsay,  of  the  business-like  capacities  of 
her  mother.  Marie  Genevieve  de  Vassan  was  a  young 
lady  in  a  very  peculiar  position.  There  was  a  law  feud 
between  the  two  branches  of  her  mother's  family  con- 
cerning the  land  of  Saulvebceuf,  and  it  was  decided  to 
extinguish  this  suit  by  a  marriage  between  M.  de  Vas- 
san's  eldest  daughter  and  her  cousin,  the  young  Saulve- 
bceuf. Death  carried  off  the  eldest  daughter,  so  the 
transaction  was  transferred  to  the  next,  Marie  Gene- 
vieve, then  only  twelve  years  old,  who  was  duly  married 
to  her  cousin.  Owing  to  her  youth  the  marriage  was 
not  consummated,  and  the  young  Saulvebceuf  died  the 
next  year,  so  that  in  1743  the  young  lady  was  wife, 
widow,  and  maid.  Victor  de  Mirabeau  had  not,  it  would 
appear,  seen  her  at  the  time  when  he  entered  into  the 
negotiations  for  the  marriage.  The  marriage  took 
place,  and  proved  most  unhappy.  Mirabeau  himself 
describes  the  twenty  years  he  passed  with  his  wife  as 
twenty  years  of  nephretic  colic. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  more  melancholy  or  a 
more  touching  story  than  that  of  John  Anthony's  wife, 
the  grandmother  of  our  tribune.  That  old  saying  of 
Solon's  about  counting  no  man  happy  till  his  death  has 
been  quoted  and  quoted  till  we  are  sick  of  it ;  but  it 
never  received  a  more  remarkable  application  than  in 
the  case  of  Fran9oise  de  Castellane.  As  a  young  woman 
she  appears  to  have  been  singularly  charming.  She 
bore  with  very  rare  modesty  the  beauty  which  attracted 
John  Anthony  ;  she  even  in  her  youth  thought  herself 
ugly,  because  she  saw  no  other  faces  that  resembled  hers, 


448  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Co.  XXIX. 

In  her  young  maidenhood  she  was  characterized  by  an 
unusual  soberness  and  wisdom.  She  said  of  herself  that 
she  always  found  herself  too  young  or  too  old  for  the 
world.  Her  married  life  was  a  pattern  of  wifely  and 
motherly  devotion.  Her  long  widowhood  was  firm, 
austere,  and  blameless.  Her  association  with  that  grim 
ruin  of  a  John  Anthony  had  imparted  a  certain  stern- 
ness to  her  nature.  She  had  moulded  herself,  as  it  were, 
into  a  stony,  uncompromising  inflexibility,  which  lent  a 
kind  of  Roman  hardness  to  her  relations  with  her  chil- 
dren and  the  world.  She  did  not  love  her  youngest  son, 
and  she  did  not  love  the  youngest  son  of  her  own  eldest 
and  well-beloved  son.  Much  of  the  misfortunes  of  our 
Mirabeau's  life  may  be  traced  to  the  severity  of  his 
grandmother.  But  that  very  severity  of  discipline  and 
rule,  that  austerity  of  morality,  only  serve  to  throw 
into  more  terrible  relief  the  last  act  of  that  rigid  life. 
After  eighty-one  years  of  virtue  and  of  piety,  the  widow 
of  John  Anthony  was  afflicted  with  the  most  cruel  visi- 
tation. Her  reason  left  her,  and  left  her  under  pecul- 
iarly poignant  conditions.  Although  the  story  of  her 
strange  affliction  has  been  much  exaggerated,  it  is  cer- 
tain that  her  madness  led  her  mind  in  a  direction  very 
different  from  that  of  its  lifelong  course.  The  tortured 
spirit  seems  to  have  railed  in  unwitting  blasphemies 
against  Heaven  ;  the  pure  tongue  to  have  uttered  lan- 
guage of  a  gross  impurity.  It  is  inexpressibly  tragic  to 
think  of  this  lofty  nature  reduced  in  extreme  old  age  to 
abject  insanity,  accepting  only  the  attentions  of  an  old 
serving-man  for  whom  she  is  said  to  have  conceived  a 
servile  affection,  and  at  moments,  in  brief  lucid  flashes, 
sending  instructions  to  the  religious  to  pray  for  her  soul 
as  for  one  already  dead.  Perhaps  one  of  the  strangest 
features  of  this  amazing  case  is  that  with  the  delirium 


1749.  BIRTH   OF   MIRABEAU.  449 

of  the  mind  the  favor  of  the  body  altered.  Something 
approaching  to  the  freshness  and  the  forms  of  youth  re- 
turned to  the  aged  body  and  gave  an  unnatural  and 
ghastly  air  of  rejuvenescence  to  the  unhappy  woman. 
For  three  years  the  victim  lingered  in  this  case,  devot- 
edly guarded  and  tended  by  her  son  the  marquis.  The 
letters  exchanged  between  the  marquis  and  his  brother 
the  Bailli  are  touching  examples  of  filial  affection  and 
filial  grief.  At  last,  in  1769,  she  died  ;  her  long  and  no- 
ble life  of  one-and-eighty  years,  her  long  and  ignoble 
agony  of  three  years,  were  sealed  by  the  sepulchre  of 
Saint-Sulpice. 

The  Vicomte  Mirabeau  thought  a  good  deal  of  him- 
self; his  brother  the  Bailli  estimated  himself  more  mod- 
estly. They  were  both  remarkable  men  ;  they  were 
destined  not  to  be  the  most  remarkable  of  their  race. 
Never  since  the  world  began  was  a  stranger  child  born 
into  it  than  Gabriel  Ilonore  Mirabeau.  He  was  born 
on  March  9,  1/49,  at  Bignon,  near  Nemours.  He  was 
not  born  into  a  happy  world ;  he  was  not  born  into  a 
happy  family.  The  Marquis  Mirabeau,  the  wild  old 
Friend  of  Man,  was  a  friend  of  woman  too,  but  not,  as 
we  have  seen,  of  the  particular  woman  who  happened 
to  be  his  wife.  Indeed,  he  had  come,  in  time,  to  hate 
her  with  a  very  decided  detestation,  which  she  returned 
in  kind.  The  young  Gabriel  Honore,  pushing  up 
through  his  sturdy,  stubborn  childhood,  throve  under 
curious  and  trying  conditions.  There  was  an  eternal 
family  Iliad  always  raging  about  his  ears.  The  mother 
and  the  father  fought  like  wild  cats.  There  was,  too, 
the  fitful  influence  of  a  certain  lady,  a  De  Pailly  from 
Switzerland,  whom  the  old  marquis,  in  his  capacity  of 
friend  of  woman,  found  very  beautiful,  altogether  de- 
lightful, but  whose  presence  did  not  tend  towards  do- 
I.— 29 


450  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

mestic  peace.     It  was  a  mad,  unlucky  household  for 
such  a  child  to  be  born  into. 

The  very  birth  was  remarkable,  Rabelaisian,  almost 
Gargantuesque.  The  huge  head  of  the  child  put  the 
mother's  life  in  imminent  peril.  That  huge  head  was 
already  adorned  with  teeth  when  its  lips  parted  for  its 
first  lusty  cry.  Never,  so  the  gossips  said,  was  a  bigger 
child  brought  forth.  The  marquis  seemed  to  take  a 
kind  of  pleasure,  in  its  great  proportions.  "I  have 
nothing  to  tell  you  about  my  enormous  son,"  he  writes 
to  his  brother  the  Bailli,  "  save  that  he  beats  his  nurse, 
who  beats  him  back  again  ;  they  pitch  into  each  other 
lustily;  they  make  a  pretty  pair  of  heads."  Some  three 
years  later,  the  small-pox,  that  terror  and  scourge  of  the 
last  century,  attacked  the  child.  The  frightened  moth- 
er applied  some  ill-advised  salve  to  the  child's  features, 
with  the  result  of  scoring  his  face  with  ineffaceable 
marks.  From  that  time  forth  the  heir  of  the  Mirabeaus 
was,  to  use  a  familiar  phrase,  as  ugly  as  sin.  Alas,  for 
the  pride  of  race  of  the  old  marquis !  It  was  part  of  the 
good  old  family  tradition,  that  tradition  fostered  and 
kept  alive  by  so  much  scheming,  so  much  self-deception, 
so  much  deception  of  others,  that  the  Mirabeaus  were 
always  comely  to  look  upon.  Comely  indeed  they  al- 
most always  were  ;  but  now,  here,  by  perverse  chance, 
was  the  latest  Mirabeau  destined  to  go  through  the 
world  the  reverse  of  comely.  The  marquis  was  furious, 
inconsolable.  It  may  be  that  the  child's  misfortune, 
instead  of  stirring  the  pity,  only  awoke  the  aversion  of 
the  marquis  ;  it  may  be  that  the  extraordinary  harsh- 
ness with  which  the  Friend  of  Man  pursued  his  son  had 
its  origin  in  an  illogical,  savage  dislike  to  see  a  Mira- 
beau bearing  a  scarred  and  disfigured  visage  through 
the  world.  In  a  being  so  unreasonable,  so  inconsistent, 


1749.  THE   BABY   MIRABEAU.  451 

as  Marquis  Mirabeau,  even  this  aberration  is  scarcely 
surprising. 

Never,  probably,  had  any  infant  in  this  world  a  more 
astonishing  education.  Montaigne's  education  was 
curious  enough  in  fact,  that  of  Martinus  Scriblerus  was 
curious  enough  in  fiction,  but  Mirabeau's  overtops  the 
fact  and  the  fiction.  His  father  tried  his  hand  ;  his. 
mother  tried  her  hand;  the  grandmother  tried  her  hand. 
The  boy  did  a  good  deal  in  a  strange,  independent  way 
towards  his  own  education.  When  he  was  only  seven 
years  old  he  solemnly  drew  up  of  his  own  accord  a  little 
Rule  of  Life  in  which,  addressing  himself  as  "  Monsieur 
Moi,"  he  tells  himself  his  duty.  He  is  to  give  heed  to 
his  handwriting.  He  is  not  to  blot  his  copies.  He  is 
to  obey  his  father,  his  master,  and  his  mother.  The 
order  in  which  obedience  is  due  is  characteristic  of  a 
child  brought  up  in  the  household  of  the  Friend  of 
Man.  He  is  not  to  contradict,  not  to  prevaricate.  He 
is  to  be  always  and  above  all  things  honorable.  He  is 
never  to  attack  unless  attacked.  He  is  to  defend  his 
fatherland.  This  is  a  sufficiently  remarkable  code  for  a 
child  of  seven  to  scheme  out.  Another  childish  note  is 
characteristic  of  the  later  man.  His  mother  once  was 
sportively  talking  to  him  of  his  future  wife.  The  child, 
conscious  of  his  own  marred  and  scarred  visage,  said 
that  the  fair  unknown  must  not  look  too  curiously  upon 
his  outward  seeming,  but  that  "  what  was  within  should 
prevail  over  what  was  without."  The  baby  Mirabeau 
was  prophetic  of  those  future  conquests,  when,  as  in  the 
case  of  Wilkes,  his  seamed  countenance  did  not  prove 
any  serious  disadvantage. 

The  mind  of  Mirabeau's  father  varied  after  the  most 
weathercock  fashion  concerning  young  Gabriel  Honore. 
Now  he  praised  him,  now  dispraised,  struck  by  the  stub- 


452  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

born  forcefulness  of  the  boy's  character,  and  irritated 
by  the  unyielding  spirit  which  tangents  from  his  own. 
In  the  end  the  queer,  unwholesome  dislike  prevailed 
over  all  other  emotions  in  the  heart  of  the  Friend  of 
Man.  He  resolved  to  send  the  unlucky  lad  out  of  his 
sight,  to  place  him  under  some  rule  more  iron  than  his 
own ;  nay,  more,  he  would  not  even  let  this  flesh  of  his 
flesh  bear  the  paternal  name.  The  burly,  troublesome, 
terrible  lad  of  fifteen  was  packed  off  to  the  correction 
school  of  the  Abbe  Choquard,  a  stern,  bitter  taskmaster, 
the  very  man,  as  old  Mirabeau  conceived,  to  break  his 
wild  colt  for  him.  But  the  sacred  name  of  Mirabeau 
was  not  to  be  inscribed  upon  the  Abbe  Choquard's  reg- 
isters. There  was  an  estate  of  the  mother's  in  Limou- 
sin; from  that  estate  the  Friend  of  Man  borrowed  the 
name  of  Buffiere,  prefixed  to  it  the  Christian  name  Pierre, 
and  sent  Gabriel  Honore  Mirabeau,  thus  metamor- 
phosed into  Pierre  Buffiere,  off  to  Paris  and  his  mer- 
ciless master.  But  the  merciless  master  was  more 
malleable  metal  than  the  father.  The  young  Buffiere's 
astonishing  capacity  for  doing  everything  he  put  his 
hand  to  easily,  and  doing  it  well,  was  in  itself  a  quality 
difficult  even  for  the  sternest  and  severest  taskmaster 
to  resist.  The  catalogue  of  Mirabeau's  accomplish- 
ments in  those  Choquard  days  is  sufficiently  compre- 
hensive. He  knew  no  less  than  four  languages,  Italian, 
Spanish,  German,  English,  as  well  as  mathematics, 
music,  fencing,  dancing,  and  riding.  He  was  a  very 
Crichton. 

As  the  Choquard  school  did  not  prove  to  be  a  taming- 
school  quite  after  the  heart  of  Victor  de  Mirabeau,  he 
began  to  cast  about  for  some  sterner  discipline,  and  de- 
cided upon  the  army.  To  the  army,  accordingly,  Mira- 
beau was  sent,  but  still  not  as  a  Mirabeau,  only  as  Pierre 


1769.  MIRABEAU  IN  CORSICA.  453 

Buffiere.  In  the  array,  as  elsewhere,  Buffiere-Mirabeau 
made  himself  conspicuous,  and  won  golden  opinions 
from  all  kinds  of  persons,  and  got  into  all  manner  of 
scrapes  and  quarrels.  He  fell  in  love,  like  the  typical 
young  soldier  of  a  thousand  tales,  with  a  young  lady  on 
whom  his  superior  officer  had  already  looked  with  eyes 
of  affection.  The  romance  ended  in  a  row,  a  flight  to 
Paris,  discovery,  capture,  a  lettre  cle  cachet,  and  a  dun- 
geon in  the  Isle  of  Rhe.  After  a  while,  and  after  much 
entreaty,  Buffiere  came  out  of  Rhe  to  take  to  the  army 
again,  and  this  time  to  the  wars  in  good  earnest.  There 
was  much  going  on  in  Corsica.  Pasquale  Paoli,  after 
knocking  the  Genoese  about,  had  taken  to  knocking 
their  successors,  the  French,  about,  and  the  French  were 
determined  to  put  him  down  at  any  cost.  Troops  were 
being  poured  into  the  island,  and  now,  with  some  of 
these  troops,  with  the  Legion  of  Lorraine,  Buffiere  was 
to  march  and  do  battle.  In  the  absolute  fitness  of 
things  it  would  be  natural  to  expect  to  find  a  Pierre 
Buffiere,  a  Gabriel  Honore  de  Mirabeau,  fighting  on  the 
side  of  Pasquale  Paoli  instead  of  against  him ;  but  the 
sub-lieutenant  in  the  Legion  of  Lorraine  had  to  do  as 
he  was  told — always  a  difficult  thing  for  him — and  so 
he  fought  against  Paoli. 

It  is  curious  to  think  that  in  that  very  year  1769,  in 
which  Buffiere-Mirabeau  was  fighting  against  the  Corsi- 
cans,  a  child  was  born  to  an  officer  of  Paoli's  insurgent 
army,  a  child  whose  birth  was  one  of  the  most  moment- 
ous that  the  world  has  witnessed.  On  Paoli's  side  no 
better  soldier  fought  than  Carlo  Buonaparte,  and  no. 
soldier  in  the  world  had  ever  a  better  or  braver  wife 
than  Letitia  Ramolino.  The  wife  accompanied  the  hus- 
band in  all  his  dangers,  was  taken  with  the  pains  of 
labor  in  Ajaccio  in  the  August  of  1769,  and  a  male  child 


454  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

was  born  to  her,  as  the  story  goes,  on  a  piece  of  tapestry 
which  represented  some  of  the  battle-scenes  of  the  Iliad. 
Thus  in  the  midst  of  battle,  and  surrounded,  as  it  were, 
by  the  symbols  of  battle,  Napoleon  Buonaparte  was 
ushered  into  Corsica  and  into  the  world.  That  little 
strenuous  island  was  indeed  a  theatre  for  Titans  in  that 
year,  when  within  its  girth  it  held  the  almost  unknown 
young  man  who  was  destined  to  be  the  greatest  man  in 
France  of  his  age,  and  the  baby  boy  who,  in  his  turn, 
was  destined  to  be  the  greatest  man  in  France,  and  to 
fill  the  world  with  the  gloom  of  his  glory.  Both  were 
of  the  kin  of  the  demigods ;  the  lives  of  both  were 
brief ;  the  lives  of  both  were  destined  to  be  the  most 
momentous  ever  lived  in  France,  among  the  most  mo- 
mentous ever  lived  in  the  history  of  the  world.  So,  for 
the  first  time  and  the  last,  the  two  greatest  names  of  the 
French  Revolution  came  together  unwittingly ;  the 
young  Mirabeau  beginning  the  work  which  the  baby 
Buonaparte  was  to  make  and  mar  thereafter. 

The  struggle  in  Corsica  did  not  last  long.  Before 
the  swelling  French  reinforcements  Paoli  gave  way, 
broke,  fled.  Many  and  many  were  the  Voceri  wailed 
for  the  gallant  dead  ;  many  a  Corsican  widow  or  be- 
reaved mother  sighed, 

"E  per  me  una  doglia  amara 
D'  esser  donna  e  poveretta." 

Paoli  himself  with  difficulty  escaped  from  Corsica,  and 
made  his  way  to  England  to  enjoy  the  friendship  of  Mr. 
James  Boswell,  of  Auchinleck,  and  to  be  presented  to 
Dr.  Johnson.  "  They  met  with  a  manly  ease,  mutually 
conscious  of  their  own  abilities  and  of  the  abilities  of 
each  other."  Was  there  ever  a  happier  account  of  the 
meeting  of  two  distinguished  men?  To  Johnson  we 
are  glad  to  think  that  "  General  Paoli  had  the  loftiest 


MIRABEAtJ  IN  PARIS.  455 

port  of  any  man  he  had  ever  seen."  That  lofty  port 
will  loom  upon  us  again  in  stranger  society.  For  the 
moment  the  national  cause  of  Corsica  was  extinguished  ; 
the  fact  that  a  child  had  been  born  to  an  obscure  Cor- 
sican  general,  that  a  young  sub-lieutenant  in  the  Legion 
of  Lorraine  was  free  to  come  back  to  France  with  a 
whole  skin,  were  events  that  seemed  not  of  the  slightest 
moment  to  any  living  soul.  Decidedly,  decisively,  the 
spirit  of  prophecy  was  wanting  on  the  earth,  for  either 
of  those  two  slight  events  was  of  vaster  importance 
than  the  subjugation  of  a  thousand  Corsicas.  Anyhow, 
Corsica,  which  had  been  swayed  turn  by  turn  by  the 
Carthaginians,  the  Romans,  the  Saracens,  and  the  Geno- 
ese, had  found  its  fate  at  Ponte  Nuovo.  The  island 
was  subjugated,  Paoli  was  in  exile  talking  to  Dr.  John- 
son, Napoleon  Buonaparte  was  born,  and  Buffiere-Mira- 
beau  was  coming  home  again. 

It  would  almost  have  seemed  at  first  that  this  stormy 
young  Buffiere  was  coming  back  to  something  like 
peace,  something  like  tranquillity.  He  had  an  interview 
with  his  uncle,  the  Bailli,  and  won  the  Bailli's  heart;  he 
had  an  interview  with  his  father,  who  seems  almost  to 
have  softened  for  a  little,  who  lectured  him  a  great  deal 
in  the  dreary  "  Friend  of  Man  "  manner,  and  finally  con- 
sented to  allow  his  son  to,  as  it  were,  un-Buffiere  himself, 
to  become  again  Gabriel  Honore  de  Mirabeau.  Gabriel 
Honore  de  Mirabeau  would  have  liked  exceedingly  to 
follow  the  career  of  arms  in  which  Pierre  Buffiere 
showed  such  promise,  but  here,  as  in  most  things,  the 
marquis  barred  the  way  to  his  son's  ambition.  That 
the  son  should  desire  anything  seems  always  to  have 
been  sufficient  reason  for  making  the  father  obdurately, 
obstinately  opposed  to  it.  The  marquis  resolved  ac- 
cordingly to  temper  his  Achilles  once  again  in  the  Sty- 


456  THE  FRENCH  DEVOLUTION.  CH.  XXIX. 

gian  stream  of  Paris.  But  whereas  Pierre  Buffiere  was 
drilled  and  schooled  and  domineered  over  in  Paris,  tast- 
ing of  the  terrors  of  the  Choquard  system,  Gabriel  IIo- 
nore  de  Mirabeau  might  ruffle  it  in  the  houses  of  the 
great  as  became  a  gentleman  of  his  blood.  To  Paris 
accordingly  Mirabeau  went,  to  the  very  delightful,  per- 
ilous Paris  of  1770;  and  in  Paris,  as  elsewhere,  won  the 
hearts  of  men  and  women.  He  made  one  friend  with 
whom  he  was  destined  to  work  much  in  later  days,  the 
young  Duke  de  Chartrcs,  ambitious  then  to  appear  the 
most  immoral  man  in  Paris — a  difficult,  a  daring  am- 
bition. He  was  to  become  ambitious  of  graver  things 
by-and-by. 

Unhappily  this  halcyon  hour  was  brief.  The  mad 
old  ruffian  Friend  of  Man  seemed  physically  and  men- 
tally incapable  of  keeping  on  good  terms  with  his  son 
for  long.  In  1772,  when  Gabriel  Honore  was  only 
twenty-three  years  old,  his  father  goaded  him  into  mak- 
ing a  marriage  as  unlucky  as  his  own.  The  young 
Mirabeau  wooed  Marie  Emilie  de  Covet,  the  only 
daughter  of  the  Marquis  de  Marignan,  and,  as  was  gen- 
erally the  way  with  any  woman  he  wooed,  he  won  her 
and  married  her.  But,  though  the  young  lady  was  an 
heiress,  she  was  allowed  very  little  money  while  her 
father  lived.  Mirabeau  was  not  a  business  man;  he  got 
deeper  and  deeper  into  debt.  Some  fraudulent  servants 
whom  the  Friend  of  Man  employed  to  spy  upon  his  son 
reported  to  him  that  Mirabeau  was  cheating  him;  the 
imbecile  old  man  believed  it,  and  by  virtue  of  a  fresh 
lettre  de  cachet — he  revelled  in  lettres  de  cachet — con- 
fined him  in  the  little  town  of  Manosque.  Here,  with 
wife,  child,  and  an  allowance  of  fifty  pounds  a  year,  he 
devoted  himself  to  study,  wrote  his  "Essay  on  Despot- 
ism," quarrelled  with  his  wife,  quarrelled  with  many 


1774-75.  SOPHIE  DE  MOtfKlfift.  457 

people,  quarrelled  with  his  father,  who  vented  his  indig- 
nation by  sending  Gabriel  Honore,  by  virtue  of  a  fresh 
lettre  de  cachet,  to  a  sterner  and  surer  imprisonment. 
The  stranger  who  visits  Marseilles  always  asks  to  be 
shown,  and  always  eyes  with  curious  emotion,  a  certain 
solid  tower  on  a  little  rocky  island  in  that  stormy  har- 
bor. That  solid  tower  was  famous  for  two  of  its  pris- 
oners, one  a  real  man,  one  the  scarcely  less  real  creation 
of  a  great  man's  genius.  The  solid  tower  is  the  his- 
toric Chateau  d'lf ;  the  fictitious  prisoner  was  Edmond 
Dantes,  afterwards  Count  of  Monte  Cristo  ;  the  real 
prisoner  was  Gabriel  Honore  de  Mirabeau.  Here  in 
this  dreary  place  he  was  kept  for  some  time ;  here,  as 
elsewhere,  he  won  the  heart  of  his  jailer,  Dallegre.  In 
the  following  year,  1775,  he  was  transferred  by  his 
father's  orders  to  the  fortress  of  Joux,  near  Pontarlier, 
in  the  mountains  of  the  Jura,  and  here  we  may  say 
that  he  met  his  fate  in  the  person  of  Sophie  de  Monnier. 
This  charming  and  beautiful  young  woman  had  been 
married  at  eighteen  to  a  mean,  dismal  old  man  more 
than  half  a  century  her  senior.  Mirabeau  became  ac- 
quainted with  Madame  de  Monnier  and  fell  deeply  in 
love  with  her  ;  she,  naturally  enough,  fell  deeply  in  love 
with  him.  But  she  had  another  admirer  in  the  Count 
de  Saint-Mauris,  the  Governor  of  Joux,  a  man  whose 
passions  had  not  been  calmed  by  seventy  years  of  a 
misspent  existence.  His  fury  on  discovering  the  loves 
of  Mirabeau  and  Madame  de  Monnier  prompted  him  to 
write  to  the  Friend  of  Man  calumniating  his  prisoner. 
The  Friend  of  Man  wrote  back  that  Mirabeau  should 
be  yet  more  strictly  confined  and  never  suffered  to 
leave  the  castle.  Mirabeau,  hearing  of  this,  escaped, 
and  after  some  months  of  weary  wanderings  in  Switzer- 
land, hunted  by  his  father's  emissaries,  he  induced  So- 


458  THE  FftENCH  REVOLUTION.          CHAP.  XXIX. 

phie  de  Monnier  to  fly  with  him  to  Holland.  Moralists 
not  a  few  have  denounced  Mirabeau  for  his  conduct  in 
this  regard,  and  yet  here,  if  anywhere  in  his  vexed,  un- 
happy life,  the  extenuating  circumstances  were  many 
and  great.  The  persecutions  of  a  fanatic  old  madman 
like  the  Friend  of  Man  are  not  the  kind  of  arguments 
best  calculated  to  lead  a  fiery  young  man  along  the 
paths  of  virtue.  As  for  the  woman,  when  we  think  of 
her  girlhood  prostituted  in  most  unnatural  marriage, 
when  we  reflect  that  her  lover  was  a  man  whom  no 
woman  was  able  to  resist,  we  may  feel  that  it  is  not 
too  hard  to  pardon  her.  That  the  love  of  these  two 
was  deep  and  genuine  it  is  needless  to  doubt.  Their 
joint  life  in  Amsterdam  was  one  of  severe  hardship,  yet 
they  seem  to  have  been  perfectly  happy  in  the  bitter 
poverty  which  allowed  them  to  be  together.  But  the 
happiness  did  not  last  long.  Their  retreat  was  dis- 
covered, and  they  were  arrested  just  as  they  were  on 
the  point  of  flying  together  to  America.  What  a  dif- 
ferent history  France  might  have  had  if  only  the  fool- 
ish, brutal  Friend  of  Man  had  allowed  his  unhappy  son 
and  the  unhappy  woman  he  loved  to  go  in  peace  to  the 
New  World  !  Sophie  was  imprisoned  in  Paris  in  a  kind 
of  asylum  for  women.  Mirabeau  was  shut  up  in  the 
donjon  of  Vincennes.  In  that  donjon  he  remained  for 
forty-one  months,  from  177*7  to  the  December  of  1780. 
From  that  donjon  he  wrote  the  famous  letters  to  Sophie 
which  have  filled  the  world  with  their  fame,  and  which 
occupy  a  curious  place  in  the  literature  of  human  pas- 
sion. .  In  that  donjon,  being  allowed  books  and  paper, 
he  wrote  indefatigably,  if  only  to  keep  himself  from 
the  persistent  thoughts  of  suicide.  He  translated  the 
exquisite  "Basia"  of  Johannes  Secundus  ;  he  wrote  all 
sorts  of  essays  and  treatises,  including  the  celebrated 


1777-80.  MIRABEAU  IN  VINCENNES.  459 

one  on  "  Lettres  de  Cachet  and  State  Prisons."  At  last 
there  came  a  term  to  his  sufferings.  His  child  died, 
and  the  Friend  of  Man,  fearing  lest  the  name  of  Mira- 
beau  should  perish,  resolved  to  suffer  the  hideous  reso- 
lution which  he  had  formed  and  callously  records,  "to 
keep  the  father  in  prison  and  even  to  destroy  all  trace 
of  him,"  to  be  relaxed.  Mirabeau's  other  child,  his 
daughter  by  Sophie,  also  died.  This  event  fostered  the 
marquis's  resolution,  and  after  entreaties  from  all  man- 
ner of  persons,  from  Mirabeau's  wife,  from  Sophie,  who 
wrote,  taking  upon  herself  all  the  blame  of  their  love 
and  flight,  from  his  daughter  Madame  de  Saillant,  after 
many  expressions  of  humility  which  it  must  have  cost 
Mirabeau  much  to  utter,  he  graciously  consented  that 
the  prison  doors  should  be  opened.  So,  after  a  cap- 
tivity of  more  than  three  years,  Mirabeau  was  again  a 
free  man.  He  stood  his  trial  at  Pontarlier  for  the  rape 
and  seduction  of  Madame  de  Monnier,  and  was  acquitted 
in  1782.  He  was  free  but  penniless  ;  his  father  would 
give  him  nothing  ;  in  a  desperate  effort  to  please  his 
father  he  brought  an  action  against  his  wife  to  force 
her  to  live  with  him,  and  lost  his  case,  and  a  decree  of 
separation  was  pronounced  between  them.  They  never 
were  reconciled,  but  the  time  came  when  she  was  proud 
of  the  name  of  Mirabeau,  and  the  last  years  of  her  life 
were  to  be  passed  in  the  house  where  he  lived,  sur- 
rounded by  all  the  objects  that  could  remind  her  of 
him,  and  she  was  to  die  in  the  room  in  which  the  great- 
est of  the  Mirabeau s  died.  Separated  from  his  wife, 
Mirabeau  was  also  separated  from  the  woman  he  loved. 
Poor  Sophie !  Mirabeau  grew  jealous  of  her,  saw  her 
only  once  after  his  liberation  from  Vincennes,  and  then 
only  to  quarrel  with  her.  His  breach  with  Sophie  is 
the  greatest  blot  on  Mirabeau's  career,  but  his  love  had 


460  f HE  FRENCH  HEVOLUTIOtf.  CH.  XXIX. 

cooled,  and  his  desperate  futile  desire  to  be  reconciled 
to  his  father  governed  all  his  purposes.  Poor  Sophie  ! 
Her  old  husband  died,  and  she  lived  in  her  convent  for 
some  years,  loved  by  all  who  came  in  contact  with  her. 
Then,  unhappily,  she  fell  in  love  and  was  about  to  be 
married,  when  her  lover  died,  and  she  killed  herself  in 
the  September  of  1789,  when  the  Old  Order  was  reel- 
ing to  its  fall  before  the  blows  of  her  old  lover.  Poor 
Sophie  ! 

It  seems  to  have  been  hardly  worth  Mirabeau's  while 
to  have  humiliated  himself  so  much,  for  he  failed  in 
the  purpose  for  which  he  strove  ;  his  father  remained 
practically  as  hostile  to  him  as  ever.  He  did  indeed 
allow  his  son  to  breathe  the  liberal  air,  but  he  still  held 
over  his  head  the  royal  order  which  permitted  the  Friend 
of  Man,  who  was  the  enemy  of  his  son,  to  compel  that 
son  to  live  wherever  his  father  pleased.  The  privilege 
of  breathing  the  air  was  indeed  the  only  privilege  the 
elder  Mirabeau  did  accord  the  younger  Mirabeau.  If 
he  could  have  lived  on  the  chameleon's  dish,  our  Mira- 
beau might  have  had  more  reason  to  be  grateful.  The 
Friend  of  Man  refused  all  provision  to  his  son,  and  the 
son,  striving  desperately  to  make  wherewithal  to  feed 
and  clothe  himself,  complains  bitterly  that  his  father 
hopes  to  starve  him  to  death  since  he  cannot  hope  to 
make  him  rob  on  the  highway.  Mirabeau  struggled 
hard  for  life  in  Paris,  where  so  many  men  of  genius, 
from  Fran 9018  Villon  to  Balzac,  have  struggled  for  life, 
and  found  the  fight  a  desperate  one.  Then,  in  a  de- 
spairing way  he  drifted  across  to  London  to  struggle 
for  life  there,  and  to  find  the  fight  harder  than  in  Paris. 
Thinking  that,  on  the  whole,  beggary  in  Paris  was  pref- 
erable to  beggary  in  London,  he  returned  to  France  in 
1785,  found  the  public  mind  much  occupied  with  finance, 


1780-85.     MIRABEAU  TRAVELLING  AND  WRITING.  461 

and  flung  himself  at  once  into  the  thick  of  the  financial 
controversy.  People  began  to  talk  much  of  this  brill- 
iant pamphleteer  ;  Minister  Calonne  even  employed  him 
for  a  season.  Then  he  drifted  off  to  Germany,  to  Ber- 
lin ;  drifted  back  to  France  again  ;  wrote  more  pam- 
phlets against  agiotage,  which  brought  him  into  antag- 
onism with  the  government ;  got  into  a  financial  con- 
troversy with  Necker,  in  which  he  made  allusions  to 
the  need  of  summoning  the  States-General  and  giving 
France  a  constitution.  When  the  Notables  were  con- 
voked, Mirabeau  hoped  to  be  made  the  secretary  of  the 
Assembly,  but  his  hope  was  disappointed  ;  the  place 
was  given  to  Dupont  de  Nemours.  Mii'abeau  was  now 
an  indefatigable  writer,  living  much  in  the  public  eye. 
In  days  which  had  no  newspapers  as  we  understand 
newspapers,  in  days  when  there  were  no  public  meet- 
ings, no  parliamentary  institutions,  it  was  no  easy  task 
for  a  poor  ambitious  man  of  genius  to  force  himself  and 
his  views  upon  public  attention.  But  Mirabeau  was 
determined,  and  Mirabeau  succeeded.  Pamphlet  after 
pamphlet,  political  treatise  after  political  treatise  teemed 
from  his  pen,  and  their  brilliancy,  their  daring,  their 
fierce  energy,  aroused  and  charmed  the  attention  of  the 
reading  world.  France  was  waking  up  to  an  interest 
in  the  political  life  which  had  been  so  long  denied  ; 
questions  of  political  liberty  were  in  the  air  ;  the  salons, 
where  philosophy  and  poetry  had  reigned,  were  now 
echoing  chiefly  to  discussion  of  the  rights  of  man  and 
the  ideals  of  constitutions.  Naturally  a  man  so  gifted 
as  Mirabeau,  capable  of  expressing  the  growing  feel- 
ings of  love  for  political  liberty  in  such  burning  words, 
was  hailed  with  enthusiasm  by  the  new  politicians. 
When  the  States-General  were  summoned  he  was  eager 
to  be  elected  to  it.  He  hurried  to  Aix,  only  to  be  met 


462  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXIX. 

by  the  nobles  with  a  stern  hostility  and  a  formal  ex- 
clusion from  their  body  as  not  possessing  any  fief  of 
his  own.  Very  well,  Mirabeau  practically  said,  you  ex- 
clude me  from  the  nobility.  I  will  try  the  people.  He 
did  try  the  people ;  he  stood  for  Aix,  in  Savoy,  and  for 
Marseilles  as  a  deputy  for  the  Third  Estate.  He  was 
elected  at  both  places  ;  he  chose  to  represent  Aix,  and 
he  came  back  to  Paris  as  to  the  conquest  of  a  new  world. 
We  are  told  that  he  was  received  with  no  show  of  wel- 
come on  that  famous  Fourth  of  May  in  the  church  of 
St.  Louis.  We  are  told  that  when  he  answered  to  his 
name  on  the  yet  more  famous  Fifth  of  May,  the  plau- 
dits that  had  greeted  other  names  were  changed  into 
hisses.  Mirabeau  was  not  the  man  greatly  to  be  moved 
by  such  cheap  expressions  of  opinion.  He  knew  well 
enough  that  his  wild  life  had  been  made  to  seem  yet 
wilder  in  popular  report ;  he  was  content  then,  as  he 
had  always  been,  to  fight  his  fight  for  himself,  and  to 
trust  to  his  own  stubborn  genius  and  his  unconquerable 
heart.  But  even  he,  with  all  his  ambitions,  with  all  his 
prescience,  could  scarcely  have  foreseen  what  a  fight 
was  awaiting  him  as  he  sat  with  his  colleagues  on  the 
opening  of  the  States-General. 

There  was  another  Mirabeau  in  that  place,  a  younger 
child  of  the  house,  destined  to  inglorious  immortality 
as  Barrel  Mirabeau.  The  friend  of  Rivarol,  the  friend 
of  Champcenetz,  he  was,  like  them,  an  impassioned  Roy- 
alist ;  like  them,  a  wild  spirit  enough  ;  like  them,  and 
surpassing  them  in  this,  a  mighty  lover  of  good  eating, 
and  especially  of  good  drinking.  Born  in  1754,  and 
made  a  Knight  of  Malta  when  he  was  but  one  year  old, 
Boniface  Riquetti — Viscount  Mirabeau — had  eaten  and 
drunk  and  fought  his  wild  way  to  these  his  thirty-five 
years  like  the  barrack-room  ruffler  he  was.  The  mad, 


1754-92.  BARREL   MIRABEAU.  463 

bad,  old  Friend  of  Man  had  been  as  lenient  to  his 
younger  son  as  he  was  barbarous  and  brutal  to  his  eld- 
est son.  Boniface  entered  the  army  in  1772;  he  had 
served  with  distinction  at  Malta  ;  he  had  lent  his  bright 
sword  to  Washington  and  the  American  colonists  in 
company  with  Lafayette  ;  he  distinguished  himself,  and 
earned  the  Order  of  Cincinnatus.  In  1780  he  came 
back  to  France,  said  a  light  farewell  to  the  Order  of 
Malta,  and  married,  but  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  set- 
tled down.  Now  the  nobility  of  Limoges  had  sent  him 
to  the  States-General,  and  from  his  place  among  his  peers 
he  could  glare  with  a  coppery  hatred  at  his  elder  broth- 
er, whose  rumored  amour  with  Madame  Lepay  pained 
his  virtuous  heart.  The  hatred  that  the  Friend  of  Man 
entertained  for  Gabriel  Honore  was  shared  to  the  full 
by  Boniface  Barrel  Mirabeau.  One  day  among  the  days 
soon  to  be,  Gabriel  Honore  will  reproach  Boniface  Bar- 
rel for  coming  drunk  to  the  Assembly,  to  which  Boni- 
face Barrel  will  practically  reply,  "  Mind  your  own  busi- 
ness ;  it  is  the  only  vice  you  have  left  me."  Boniface 
was  the  hero  of  the  Rivarols  and  Champcenetz,  the  Pel- 
tiers and  the  Suleaus ;  his  unwieldy  bulk  was  the  de- 
light of  the  caricaturists ;  the  sword  he  drew  for  Gen- 
eral Washington  and  Lafayette  was  ever  ready  to  leap 
from  its  scabbard  in  the  duello. 


464  T1IE   FHENCII  REVOLUTION.  Cn.XXX. 


CHAPTER  XXX. 

THE     MAN     FROM     AREAS. 

THERE  were  few  men  present  on  that  great  day  whose 
presence  was  more  dangerous  to  Louis  XVI.  than  the 
Anglomaniac,  dissolute,  Freemason  Duke  of  Orleans.  The 
Duke  of  Orleans  was  one  of  the  best-known  men  in  all 
that  strange  gathering.  He  was  the  centre  of  all  man- 
ner of  intrigues.  He  was  hated  by  the  queen.  Pie  was 
adored  by  the  mob  partly  on  account  of  that  very  hatred. 
He  was  the  figure-head  of  a  party  that  brought  into  more 
or  less  veiled  association  men  of  all  manner  of  minds  and 
all  manner  of  purposes.  He  was  among  the  most  con- 
spicuous figures  in  that  day's  pageant.  Perhaps  the 
very  least  conspicuous  figure  in  the  day's  pageant  was 
that  of  a  young  man  from  Arras,  who  had  been  sent  as 
deputy  from  his  native  town,  and  about  whom  Paris 
and  Versailles  knew  nothing  and  cared  nothing.  Yet 
the  insignificant  young  man  from  Arras,  with  the  mea- 
gre, unwholesome  face  and  the  eager,  observant  eyes, 
was,  if  king  and  court  and  Third  Estate  could  but  have 
guessed  it,  infinitely  more  important  than  the  Duke  of 
Orleans  or  than  a  dozen  such  Dukes  of  Orleans;  infi- 
nitely more  important  than  any  man  in  the  whole  As- 
sembly, with  the  single  exception  of  Gabriel  Honore 
Riquetti  de  Mirabeau. 

It  is  said  that,  long  years  before  the  meeting  of  the 
States-General,  it  came  to  pass  that  Louis  XVI.  visited 
the  famous  college  of  Louis  le  Grand  in  Paris.  Flat- 


1758-89.  A  ROYAL   VISIT.  465 

tered  authority  brought  forward  its  model  boy  for  au- 
gust inspection  and  gracious  august  approval.  What 
seeds,  elated  authority  no  doubt  whispered  to  itself, 
might  not  be  sown  in  the  youthful  aspiring  bosom  by 
a  word  or  two  of  kingly  commendation.  In  this  way 
the  son  of  Saint  Louis  and  the  son  of  an  Arras  attorney 
were  brought  for  a  moment  face  to  face.  The  leanish, 
greenish  young  man  no  doubt  bowed  in  respectful  si- 
lence; the  monarch  no  doubt  said  the  civil  words  that 
were  expected  of  him  and  went  his  way,  and  no  doubt 
forgot  all  about  the  matter  five  minutes  afterwards;  for- 
got that  he  had  ever  met  the  most  promising  pupil  of 
Louis  le  Grand,  and  that  the  promising  pupil's  name  was 
Maximilien  Robespierre.  What  seeds,  we  may  wonder, 
wore  sown  in  that  youthful  aspiring  bosom  by  the  word 
or  two  of  kingly  commendation.  Did  the  most  promis- 
ing pupil  of  Louis  le  Grand  have  any  prophetic  glimpse 
of  the  strange,  almost  rniVaculous  ways  by  which  he 
and  that  complimentary,  smiling,  foolish  king  should  be 
brought  again  into  juxtaposition?  Assuredly  not;  and 
yet  history,  in  all  the  length  and  breadth  of  its  fantas- 
tic picture-gallery,  hardly  affords  to  the  reflective  mind 
a  more  astonishing  interview  than  that — the  patronizer 
and  the  patronized,  the  plump,  comely,  amiable  king, 
the  lean,  unwholesome,  respectful  pupil.  So  strangely 
did  destiny  forge  the  first  links  of  enduring  union  be- 
tween these  two  lives  that  might  well  seem  as  inevitably 
sundered  as  the  poles. 

We  may  fairly  assume  that,  when  Louis  XVI.  looked 
with  angry  scrutiny  upon  the  hatted  heads  of  the  auda- 
cious Third  Estate,  he  did  not  recognize  that  one  lean, 
greenish  face,  under  its  black  felt,  was  familiar  to  him. 
The  promising  pupil  of  Louis  le  Grand  had  scarcely 
dreamed  that  the  next  time  he  stood  in  the  royal  pres- 
I.— 30 


466  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXX. 

ence  he  would  dare  to  assert  a  noble  privilege  and  cover 
himself  in  the  presence  of  a  king.  The  taking  off  and 
the  putting  on  of  a  hat  may  seem  a  simple  matter,  on 
which  little  or  nothing  of  any  moment  could  possibly 
depend.  Yet  that  insignificant  process,  rendered  in  this 
instance  so  significant,  may  first  have  assured  the  young 
deputy  from  Arras  of  the  vast  gulf  that  lay  between 
him  and  the  promising  pupil  of  the  old  days.  There 
was  a  greater  gulf  yet  to  be  fixed  between  that  insignif- 
icant young  deputy,  audacious  with  the  audacity  of  force 
of  numbers  and  a  common  encouragement,  and  the  man 
who  bore  his  name  a  year  or  two  later.  Of  that  his  col- 
leagues had  little  notion  then.  There  was  no  man  in 
the  Third  Estate,  there  was  no  man  in  the  world,  wise 
enough  to  predict  the  future  of,  or,  indeed,  any  future 
for,  that  obscure,  unhealthy  young  lawyer.  Were  there 
no  readers  of  hands,  no  star-gazers,  no  pupils  of  Lava- 
ter  there  to  discover  their  master  in  the  humblest  of 
them  all  ? 

He  had  come  from  pleasant  Arras,  in  the  leafy  Artois 
land,  where  Scarpe  and  Crinchon  flow  together.  The 
smiling-  land  had  seen  many  strange  and  famous  faces. 
It  had  seen  the  wrinkled  baldness  of  Julius  Cresar  in  the 
days  when  he  overcame  the  Atrebates.  It  had  seen  the 
lantern-jaws  of  the  Eleventh  Louis  when  he  came  to  beat 
Burgundy  out  of  the  Arras  hearts,  and  sought,  as  kings 
before  and  after  sought,  to  change  facts  by  changing 
names,  and  to  convert  Arras  from  its  errors  by  re-bap- 
tizing it  Franchise.  It  had  seen  the  bearded  Spaniards 
hold  their  own  for  many  generations,  and  leave  their 
traces  permanently  behind  them  in  the  architecture, 
which  makes  the  wanderer  rub  his  eyes  and  wonder  if, 
by  chance,  he  has  not  somehow  strayed  into  Old  Castile. 
Latin  and  Gaul  and  Frank,  and  Burgundian  and  Hidal- 


1758.  BIETH   OF  ROBESPIERRE.  467 

go  from  Spain,  of  each  and  all  the  leafy  Artois  land 
held  memories;  but  of  all  the  faces  that  had  come  and 
gone  there  was  none  it  more  needed  to  remember  than 
the  pale  youthful  advocate  to  whom  all  these  memories 
were  familiar,  and  who  now  was  representing  Artois  in 
the  States-General.  The  fair  old  square  of  Arras,  with 
its  glorious  old  Town  Hall,  its  cool  Castilian  colonnades, 
and  all  the  warmth  of  color  and  gracious  outline  of  its 
Spanish  houses,  had  been  crossed  a  thousand  times  by 
young  Maximilien  de  Robespierre,  and  no  man  had 
taken  much  heed.  But  the  Robespierre  footsteps  were 
going  to  sound  loudly  in  men's  ears,  the  Robespierre 
face  to  become  the  most  momentous  of  all  the  Arras 
gallery. 

He  was  still  very  young.  He  was  born  in  Arras  on 
May  6, 1758,  and  had  now  just  completed  his  thirtieth 
year.  Of  his  ancestors  we  know  little  or  nothing ;  the 
genealogy  of  the  family  is  uncertain.  They  seem  to 
have  stemmed  from  an  Irish  stock  planted  in  France  in 
the  sixteenth  century.  The  name  Robespierre  is  cer- 
tainly not  Irish,  but  it  is  suggested  that  the  name  of  the 
original  immigrant  may  have  been  Robert  Spiers,  a  pos- 
sible, if  fanciful,  derivation.  Some  strain  of  nobility  is 
suggested  by  the  courtly  prefix  of  "de"  which  Robes- 
pierre himself  wore  for  a  time ;  but  his  immediate  kin, 
his  father  and  grandfather,  belonged  to  the  middle  class, 
and  followed  the  profession  of  advocates  to  the  provin- 
cial council  of  Artois.  It  is  said,  and  it  certainly  mat- 
ters very  little,  that  the  family  name  should  be  Derobes- 
pierre,  all  in  one  word,  and  it  is  indeed  so  written  in  the 
act  of  birth  of  Robespierre  preserved  in  the  baptismal 
register  of  the  parochial  church  of  the  Magdalen  for  the 
year  1758.  When  he  dropped  the  prefix  is  not  quite 
certain.  There  came  a  time  when  such  prefixes  were 


468  THE  FRENCH  KEVOLUTIOX.  CH.  XXX. 

dangerous  indeed,  smacking  of  adhesion  to  the  Old 
Order,  treason  to  republicanism,  and  the  like.  In  the 
list  in  the  Moniteur  of  the  deputies  of  the  Third  Estate 
the  name  is  simply  given  Robespierre.  The  point  is 
unimportant ;  that  familiar  creature  History  has  settled 
the  matter,  and  Maximilien  Marie  Isidore  de  Robes- 
pierre is  known  to  us  and  to  all  time  simply  as  Maxi- 
milien Robespierre. 

When  he  was  only  seven  years  old,  his  mother, 
Jacqueline  Carrault  by  her  maiden  name,  died,  and  the 
death  seems  to  have  broken  the  heart  and  the  life  of  the 
elder  Maximilien  Robespierre.  He  left  Arras  abruptly, 
and,  after  wandering  in  a  purposeless  kind  of  way  about 
the  world,  drifting  through  England  and  through  Ger- 
many, died  in  Munich,  leaving  his  four  children,  two 
boys  and  two  girls,  unprovided  for.  Mr.  Lewes  cyni- 
cally throws  doubts  upon  this  sensibility.  All  things 
considered,  he  thinks  the  painful  associations  of  Arras 
much  more  likely  to  have  had  reference  to  some  unset- 
tled bills.  Men  do  fly  from  creditors  ;  but  they  seldom 
leave  their  native  town,  their  profession,  and  their  chil- 
dren from  grief  at  the  loss  of  a  wife.  However  this 
may  be,  the  Robespierres'  father  did  go  away  from 
Arras,  did  die  away  from  Arras,  leaving  his  children  to 
the  mercy  of  the  world.  The  relations  came  to  the 
rescue.  Maximilien  was  educated  for  a  time  at  the 
College  of  Arras,  and  after  a  while,  thanks  to  the  pat- 
ronage of  the  bishop  of  Arras,  M.  de  Conzie,  he  got  a 
purse  at  the  College  of  Louis  le  Grand  in  Paris.  Here 
he  had  for  colleagues  Camille  Desmoulins  and  Freron, 
Desmoulins  the  Picard  and  Freron  the  Parisian.  The 
simple  bond  of  scholastic  studies  and  scholastic  emula- 
tion was  to  be  exchanged  in  its  due  time  for  a  closer 
and  a  bloodier  bond.  The  grave,  prim,  patient  lad  from 


1758-89.  AT  LOtTtS  LE   GRAND.  469 

Arras,  schooled  by  poverty  in  perseverance  and  the  am- 
bition to  do  well  for  his  brother  and  his  little  sisters, 
dreamed  that  the  wild,  vivacious  Picard  was  to  be  his 
victim  and  the  turbulent,  energetic  Parisian  his  judge. 
Here  it  was,  too,  at  this  College  of  Louis  le  Grand,  that 
the  king  came  and  saw,  for  the  first  time,  in  the  face  of 
the  model  boy  of  the  school,  the  face  of  his  own  fate. 
There  is  a  kind  of  tragic  completeness  in  the  way  in 
which  the  lives  of  all  these  children  of  the  Revolution, 
the  doomed  and  the  dooming,  are  kept  together,  which 
recalls  the  interwoven  strands  of  some  Greek  tale  of 
destiny.  To  Robespierre,  however,  just  then,  the  only 
destiny  apparent  was  the  destiny  to  scrape  some  money 
together,  and  provide  as  a  model  brother  should  for  his 
poor  next-of-kin.  With  this  end  always  in  view,  he 
worked  hard  and  he  worked  well.  After  finishing  his 
classical  studies  he  studied  the  law,  still  under  the  wing 
of  the  College  of  Louis  le  Grand  ;  he  worked  at  the 
same  time  in  the  office  of  a  procureur  named  Nollion. 
This  procureur  had  a  first  clerk  named  Brissot,  then  at 
work  upon  his  "  Theory  of  the  Criminal  Laws,"  and 
exciting  himself  exceedingly  about  the  sufferings  of 
the  blacks  in  the  American  colonies.  He  and  the  young 
student  from  Arras  may  have  often  exchanged  sympa- 
thies on  the  injustices  of  this  world,  happily  uncon- 
scious of  an  8th  Brumaire  and  a  10th  Thermidor. 

When  the  time  came  for  Robespierre  to  sunder  his 
connection  with  the  College  of  Louis  le  Grand,  the  col- 
lege authorities,  to  mark  their  sense  of  admiration  for 
his  "conspicuous  talents,"  his  good  conduct,  and  his 
continued  successes,  accorded  him,  in  a  formal  and  so- 
norous document,  a  gratification  of  six  hundred  livres. 
Thereupon  Maximilien  Robespierre  returned  to  Arras, 
having  succeeded,  it  would  seem,  in  obtaining  the  sue- 


470  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXX. 

cession  in  his  studies  for  his  younger  brother.  We 
learn,  in  an  uncertain  legendary  way,  that  while  he  was 
still  in  Paris  he  made  a  kind  of  Mecca  pilgrimage  to 
Rousseau,  then  drifting  swiftly  on  towards  his  myste- 
rious death.  One  would  like  much  to  know  what  passed 
between  the  Apostle  of  Affliction  and  the  prim,  pertina- 
cious young  collegian  who  adored  the  "  Contrat  Social " 
and  the  "  Vicaire  Savoyard,"  and  how  far  the  Self -tor- 
turing Sophist  saw  in  the  livid  Artois  lad,  with  his 
narrow  purposes  and  inflammable  sentimentalism,  the 
proper  pupil  of  his  own  philosophies.  What  a  subject 
for  a  new  Landor  such  a  conversation  offers  ! 

The  new  Landor  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  presented 
himself  in  the  person  of  the  anonymous  author  of  what 
purported  to  be  an  autobiography  of  Robespierre,  pub- 
lished in  two  volumes  in  Paris  in  1830,  and  really  the 
work  of  M.  Charles  Reybaud.  Yet  there  is  a  good  deal 
of  cleverness  in  this  pretended  autobiography.  The 
remarks  Robespierre  is  made  to  utter  concerning  his 
admiration  for  Rousseau  are  such  as  seem  singularly 
appropriate  to  his  mouth,  and  the  final  determination 
to  visit  the  philosopher  is  quite  what  Robespierre  might 
have  written.  "  I  set  out  alone  for  Ermenonville  on  a 
fine  morning  in  the  month  of  June.  I  made  the  journey 
on  foot,  the  reflections  that  preoccupied  me  not  permit- 
ting me  to  find  it  long.  Besides,  at  nineteen,  when  one 
is  mastered  by  an  idea,  a  fine  road  before  him,  and  the 
head  full  of  the  future,  he  soon  arrives  at  the  end.  A 
youth  of  my  age  would  have  made,  to  see  a  woman's 
eyes,  the  same  journey  which  I  made  to  see  a  philos- 
opher." This  last  touch  is  well  worthy  of  Robespierre. 
The  interview  with  Rousseau  is  charming  enough  to 
make  us  wish  it  were  real.  The  pair  wander  together 
for  two  delicious  hours,  discussing  botany  and  philos- 


1758-89.  TFIE   ROSATl.  4V1 

ophy;  they  part  with  an  appointment  to  meet  again  the 
next  month;  but  when  the  appointed  day  arrives  Rous- 
seau is  dead.  At  least  the  interview  is  one  which  might 
very  well  have  taken  place.  Those  who  desire  to  cling 
to  the  belief  that  Rousseau  and  Robespierre  did  meet 
may  dwell  with  pleasure  upon  the  words  of  Charlotte 
Robespierre  :  "  I  know  not  on  what  occasion  it  was,  but 
it  is  certain  that  my  brother  had  an  interview  with  Jean 
Jacques  Rousseau." 

Once  back  in  Arras,  Maximilien  seems  to  have  settled 
steadily  down  to  a  most  exemplary,  industrious,  method- 
ical life.  He  was  devoted  to  his  family,  to  his  studies, 
to  his  profession,  content  for  highest  relaxation  with 
the  simple  pleasures  and  amusements  of  a  small  country 
town.  There  was  an  academy  in  Arras,  of  which  the 
young  advocate  was  a  conspicuous  and  diligent  mem- 
ber. For  this  academy  he  wrote  a  eulogium  of  Gresset, 
in  which  he  ran  full  tilt  against  the  Voltaireans,  and  a 
eulogium  of  the  president,  Dupaty.  There  was  also  in 
the  little  town  one  of  those  amiable,  harmless  associa- 
tions of  a  cheaply  aesthetic  kind,  of  which  the  grotesque 
Arcadians  of  Rome  had  set  the  fashion,  called  the  Ro- 
sati. The  Rosati  seem  to  have  delighted  in  a  good  deal 
of  innocent  tomfoolery  in  the  ceremonial  receptions  of 
members,  who  had,  it  seems,  to  draw  three  deep  breaths 
over  a  rose,  affix  the  flower  to  their  button-hole,  quaff 
a  glass  of  rose-red  wine,  and  recite  some  verses  before 
they  were  qualified  to  inscribe  their  names  on  the  illus- 
trious roll  of  the  Rosati.  For  the  Rosati  Robespierre 
wrote  a  masterpiece,  now  forgotten,  called  the  "  Preach- 
er's Handkerchief,"  and  the  curious  can  read  with  no 
great  difficulty  a  madrigal  of  the  gallant  and  poetic  ad- 
vocate, offered  to  a  lady  of  Arras  whom  he  addressed  in 
a  simpering  vein  as  the  young  and  fair  Ophelia,  and 


472  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXX. 

whom  he  adjures,  in  spite  of  her  mirror,  to  be  content, 
to  be- beautiful  without  knowing  it,  to  ever  preserve  her 
modesty.  "  You  will  only  be  the  better  beloved,"  says 
the  rhyming  rose-wearer,  "  if  you  fear  not  to  be." 

Was  Ophelia,  we  may  wonder,  the  fair  being  whom 
legend  asserts  that  Robespierre  loved  but  who  proved 
inconstant  ?  Was  she  the  woman  to  whom  the  motto 
on  an  early  picture  of  Robespierre  is  said  to  allude  ? 
Robespierre  in  the  picture  has  a  rose  in  his  hand,  and 
the  motto  runs,  "  Tout  pour  mon  amie."  How  the  lady 
liked  the  faded  graces  of  the  poet  we  do  not  know. 
But  we  may  rest  at  least  convinced  that  the  world, 
whatever  it  gained  or  lost  by  Robespierre's  adherence 
to  politics,  did  not  lose  a  great  poet.  It  was  but  a  cast 
of  the  dice  in  Fortune's  fingers,  and  Maximilien  Robes- 
pierre might  have  gone  on  to  the  end  of  his  days,  cher- 
ishing his  family,  studying  his  books,  addressing  his 
academy,  and  penning  frigid  gallantries  for  the  amiable 
noodles  of  the  Rosati.  But  he  had  another  cup  to  drink 
than  the  rose-red  wine  of  the  provincial  poets. 

Yet  this  brother  of  the  rose  guild  was  imbued  with  a 
sensitiveness  which  was  more  than  feminine.  We  learn 
from  his  sister  of  the  agony  of  his  grief  for  the  death 
of  a  favorite  pigeon.  Birds  appear  to  have  been  at 
all  times  a  weakness  of  his.  A  letter  of  his  has  been 
preserved,  to  a  young  lady  of  Arras,  in  which  he  dis- 
cusses with  an  elaborate  and  somewhat  awkward  play- 
fulness the  conduct  of  some  canary-birds  which  appear 
to  have  been  presented  by  the  young  lady  to  the  Robes- 
pierre family.  Could  there  possibly  be  a  stranger  pref- 
ace to  the  Reign  of  Terror  than  this  quiet,  provincial 
life,  with  its  quiet,  provincial  pastimes  and  studies,  and 
its  babble  about  roses  and  canary-birds  and  Ophelias, 
and  its  gentle  air  of  domestic  peace  ?  There  need  be 


1758-89.    THE  FIRST  AKD  LAST  OF  WORLD  PROBLEMS.    473 

nothing  very  surprising  in  the  contrast.  History  de- 
lights in  such  dyptichs  ;  but  it  is  a  far  cry  from  the  poet 
of  Ophelie  to  the  killer  of  Olympe  de  Gouges. 

Life  was  not,  indeed,  all  canary-birds  and  roses  to  the 
young  Maximilien.  Let  Mr.  Morley,  who  perhaps  more 
than  any  other  modern  writer  possesses  the  art  of  tell- 
ing a  difficult  truth  delicately,  speak  :  "  He  was  not 
wholly  pure  from  that  indiscretion  of  the  young  appe- 
tite about  which  the  world  is  mute,  but  whose  better 
ordering  and  governance  would  give  a  diviner  bright- 
ness to  the  earth."  How  that  better  ordering  and  gov- 
ernance is  to  be  brought  about,  Mr.  Morley  does  not 
hint.  Robespierre  and  his  revolutionary  familiars 
thought  on  this  matter  very  much  as  Mr.  Morley 
thinks,  and  did  their  best  in  their  strange  way,  when 
the  world  seemed  shattered  to  bits,  to  remould  it  nearer 
to  their  heart's  desire.  Among  the  ntany  heroic  vir- 
tues upon  which  Robespierre  in  later  years  sought  to 
base  his  astonishing  system,  purity  had  its  prominent 
place.  Burke's  criticism  on  systems  based  on  the  he- 
roic virtues  proved  as  well  founded  here  as  elsewhere. 
Wild  schemes  which  sought  to  abolish  love  and  sub- 
stitute friendship  had  their  inevitable  reaction  in  the 
naked  orgies  of  the  Directory.  The  governance  and 
ordering  of  the  young  appetite  is  the  first  and  last  of 
world  problems.  That  that  indiscretion  should  num- 
ber the  cold,  passionless,  methodical  Robespierre  among 
its  victims  is  not  the  least  remarkable  proof  of  the  diffi- 
culty of  the  problem. 

Those  strange  revolutions  of  what  the  Persian  poet 
calls  the  Wheel  of  Heaven,  which  brought  the  young 
Robespierre  again  and  again  in  contact  with  men  who 
were  to  be  his  familiars,  his  victims,  and  his  execu- 
tioners in  the  great  drama,  brought  him,  on  his  return 


474  TIIE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXX. 

to  Arras,  in  juxtaposition  with  a  young  officer  of  en- 
gineers named  Carnot.  Young  Carnot  had  a  lawsuit. 
Robespierre  pleaded  it  for  him.  Young  Carnot  was 
a  member  of  the  Rosati,  and  shared  in  its  delicate  fol- 
lies. In  one  of  his  verses  for  the  Rosati,  Robespierre 

JLSKfi   * 

"  Qui  n'aimerait  &  boire 
A.  Fami  Carnot  ?" 

Here,  again,  is  one  of  those  brilliant  contrasts  in  which 
the  story  of  the  Revolution  is  so  fecund.  A  young 
lawyer  and  a  young  engineer-captain  sit  side  by  side 
in  affable  amateur  gatherings  with  rosebuds  in  their 
button-holes,  and  recite  verses  and  listen  to  the  recitals 
of  others.  A  twist  in  the  kaleidoscope,  and  they  are 
still  sitting  side  by  side  in  organized  fellowship  ;  but 
this  time  their  names  are  the  most  famous  in  France, 
and  their  fellowship  is  the  Committee  of  Public  Safety. 
The  Son  of  the  Organizer  of  Victory,  in  his  memoirs  of 
his  father,  would  wish  it  to  be  understood  that  there 
was  little  or  no  friendship  between  the  young  Robes- 
pierre and  the  young  Carnot.  But  they  were  in  the 
same  town,  members  of  the  same  social  guild  ;  they 
may  not  have  been  close  friends,  but  it  is  difficult,  es- 
pecially with  Robespierre's  familiar  allusion  in  our  ears, 
to  believe  that  they  were  not  brought  into  some  degree 
of  familiar  relationship. 

Robespierre's  legal  career  at  Arras  was  sufficiently 
distinguished.  He  pleaded  the  cause  of  science  when 
he  defended  the  cause  and  won  the  case  of  a  citizen  of 
advanced  views,  who  had  mounted  a  lightning-rod 
upon  his  house,  to  the  alarm  of  less-educated  municipal 
authority.  He  fought  for  an  old  woman  who  had  got 
into  a  quarrel  with  a  powerful  abbey.  He  held  his  own 
against  the  bishop  of  Arras,  his  old  patron,  M.  de  Con- 


1784-85.  ROBESPIERRE'S  ESSAY.  4-75 

zie,  and  his  courage  pleased  his  old  patron  and  prompted 
him  to  a  fresh  act  of  patronage.  He  appointed  him 
as  judge  of  his  civil  and  criminal  tribunal.  All  the 
world  knows  and  marvels  at  the  reasons  which  in- 
duced Robespierre  to  resign  this  office,  which,  while  he 
held  it,  he  employed  manfully  to  uphold  popular  rights 
against  the  edicts  of  Lamoignon.  One  day  the  necessi- 
ties of  his  office  compelled  him  to  record  a  death  sen- 
tence against  a  murderer,  convicted  by  overwhelming 
proof.  His  sister  Charlotte  relates  how  he  came  home 
positively  crushed  by  despair  at  the  act  which  he  had 
just  committed.  It  was  wholly  in  vain  that  she  strove 
to  console  him,  pointing  out  with  sisterly  solicitude  that 
the  man  he  had  condemned  was  a  scoundrel  of  the 
worst  kind,  unfit  to  live.  All  the  answer  she  could 
wring  from  the  despairing  Robespierre  was,  "A  scoun- 
drel no  doubt ;  but  think  of  taking  a  man's  life  !"  He 
thought  of  it  till  he  could  bear  it  no  longer,  and  then 
formally  resigned  the  office  which  forced  him  to  such 
terrible,  such  heart  -  breaking  horrors,  and  returned  to 
his  career  at  the  bar.  Time  was  to  make  him  less 
sqeamish. 

A  competition  was  opened  by  the  Academy  of  Metz  in 
1784  for  an  essay  "  Sur  les  Peines  Infamantes."  Robes- 
pierre entered  the  lists  with  an  essay  which  won  the  sec- 
ond place.  The  first  was  gained  by  Lacretelle  the  elder, 
then  a  lawyer  in  Paris,  afterwards  destined,  with  his 
brother,  the  historian,  to  struggle  against  Robespierre 
in  a  far  more  serious  competition.  Robespierre  pub- 
lished his  essay  in  1785.  It  is  an  earnest,  even  eloquent 
protest  against  the  prejudice  which  inflicts  upon  the 
families  of  criminals  some  stigma  of  their  punishment. 
The  way  which  Robespierre  sees  out  of  the  difficulty  is 
curious,  as  showing  the  survival  of  one  of  the  old  no- 


476  THE  FHENCH  REVOLUTION.          CH.  xxx. 

ble  privileges  and  the  gradual  working  of  Robespierre's 
mind.  Death  by  the  scaffold  was  reserved  wholly  for 
criminal  offenders  of  noble  blood.  Robespierre  pro- 
posed that  this  distinction  should  be  swept  away,  and 
that  punishment  by  the  scaffold  should  be  the  lot  of 
criminals  of  all  classes.  By  thus  equalizing  the  pun- 
ishment he  considered  that  the  stigma  attaching  to  the 
families  of  condemned  criminals  was  minimized.  The 
Sansons  were  swinging  their  headsman's  swords  in  those 
days,  and  Robespierre's  Parisian  colleague  in  the  States- 
General  had  not  yet  conceived  the  immortal  instrument 
which  was  to  be  so  strangely  efficacious  in  carrying 
Robespierre's  theory  into  practice. 

When  the  year  1789  set  France  fermenting,  Robes- 
pierre was  director  of  the  Arras  Academy.  He  seized 
upon  the  opportunity  offered  by  the  convocation  of  the 
States-General  to  fling  himself  into  the  agitation  of 
political  life.  He  formulated  his  political  creed,  or  so 
much  of  it  as  had  as  yet  taken  shape  in  that  narrow,  la- 
borious mind,  in  an  "Address  to  the  Artois  Nation,"  in 
which  he  insisted  upon  the  need  of  reforming  the 
states  of  Artois.  In  Artois,  as  elsewhere  in  France, 
there  was  a  kind  of  farce  of  representation.  In  most 
cases  the  representation  was  a  fiction,  as  the  members 
who  composed  the  States  had  not  been  freely  elected  by 
their  fellow-citizens.  In  Artois  the  States  were  theo- 
retically made  up  of  representatives  of  the  three  or- 
ders, the  Nobility,  the  Clergy,  and  the  Third  Estate  ; 
but  practically  none  of  them  were  seriously  represented. 
Robespierre,  with  his  keen,  quick  perceptions,  saw  that 
the  happy  moment  had  come  for  reforming  all  that, 
and  in  his  thorough  way  he  was  for  reforming  it  alto- 
gether. He  denounced  the  existing  order  of  things, 
painted  a  vigorous  picture  of  the  miseries  which  injus- 


1789.  THE  AETOIS  CANDIDATE.  477 

tice  and  inequality  gave  rise  to,  and  called  upon  his 
fellow-citizens,  with  a  passion  which  was  none  the  less 
real  because  its  stream  ran  a  little  thin,  to  tumble  the 
sham  old  Estates  of  Artois  overboard  altogether.  Robes- 
pierre had  the  discernment  to  perceive  that  now  or  never 
was  the  moment  for  those  of  his  inclining  to  assert  them- 
selves. The  Estates  of  Artois  were  eager  to  bolster 
themselves  up  again  with  the  aid  of  the  National  As- 
sembly. They  claimed  the  right  themselves  to  send 
the  deputies  to  the  States  -  General.  Robespierre  as- 
sailed these  pretensions  fiercely.  He  urged  the  peo- 
ple to  appreciate  the  importance  of  the  hour,  to  send 
those  in  whom  they  could  trust  to  represent  them,  and 
to  be  no  longer  juggled  by  the  trickeries  and  treacher- 
ies of  the  privileged  classes. 

In  this  pamphlet  Robespierre  practically  put  himself 
forward  as  a  candidate  ;  it  stimulated  public  feeling 
and  made  him  a  marked  man.  People  read  his  vehe- 
ment appeal,  thrilled  at  its  indignation,  and  resolved 
that  Robespierre  should  be  the  man  for  Artois.  He  fol- 
lowed up  this  first  blow  by  another  in  an  address  to  the 
people  of  Artois,  in  which  he  painted  a  skilful  picture 
of  the  sort  of  deputy  the  Third  Estate  of  Artois  really 
needed.  The  picture  needed  a  name  no  more  than  the 
picture  in  the  Salon  of  1791  needed  other  label  than 
"The  Incorruptible."  Having  painted  his  picture  of 
the  ideal  deputy  in  such  a  way  as  without  mentioning 
his  own  name  to  present  his  own  image,  he  spoke  di- 
rectly of  himself.  He  did  not  think  himself  indeed 
worthy  of  the  honor  of  representing  his  fellow-citizens, 
but  he  did  modestly  think  that  he  might  be  of  some 
service  with  advice  and  counsel  in  that  trying  time. 
"  I  have  a  true  heart,  a  firm  soul,"  he  declared.  "  If 
there  is  a  fault  to  urge  against  me,  it  is  that  I  have 


478  THE   FRENCH    REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXX. 

never  known  bow  to  cloak  my  thoughts,  to  have  never 
said  yes  when  my  conscience  bade  me  say  no,  to  have 
never  paid  court  to  the  powerful,  to  have  preserved  my 
independence." 

Robespierre  was  duly  elected  an  Artois  deputy,  and 
set  off  in  the  spring  weather  from  Arras,  where  he  was 
known,  to  Paris,  where  he  was  utterly  unknown.  In 
those  days,  when  communication  between  the  capital 
and  the  provinces  was  slow  and  difficult,  it  was  perfectly 
possible  for  a  man  to  enjoy  quite  a  little  reputation 
In  his  own  locality  and  be  wholly  ignored  a  hundred 
leagues  away.  Robespierre  left  Arras  as  a  very  dis- 
tinguished person,  the  admired  of  the  people,  the  dis- 
liked of  the  privileged  classes,  an  able  lawyer  and  au- 
thor, a  too  susceptible,  too  humane  judge.  He  arrived 
in  Paris,  where  no  whisper  of  his  provincial  fame  had 
preceded  him,  where  nobody  knew  who  he  was  or  cared 
to  know  who  he  was.  He  was  not,  like  Mirabeau,  the 
man  to  command  attention  in  places  where  his  name 
was  unknown.  His  small,  ungraceful  body,  his  un- 
gainly limbs,  lent  few  advantages  to  his  presence.  A 
physiognomist  might,  perhaps,  have  discovered  much 
in  the  face,  with  its  pointed  chin,  its  small,  projecting 
forehead,  its  large  mouth  and  small  nose ;  in  the  thin, 
drawn -down  lips,  the  deeply  sunken  blue  eyes,  over 
which  the  lids  drooped  languidly  ;  the  almost  sinister 
composure  of  the  gaze,  whose  gravity  was  occasion- 
ally tempered  by  a  not  unpleasing  smile.  But  there 
were  no  physiognomists  idle  enough  in  Paris  just  then 
to  'give  their  attention  to  an  obscure  stranger's  face  ; 
and  so  Robespierre  came  and  went  unheeded — and  now 
sits  unheeded,  looking  at  the  king. 

If  Robespierre  was  little  understood,  little  known  at 
the  time  of  which  we  treat,  he  scarcely  seems  to  be 


1789.  DIFFERING   OPINIONS.  479 

much  better  understood  or  much  better  known  to-day. 
France,  in  the  persons  of  its  writers,  may  be  said  to 
divide  itself  into  two  hostile  and  wholly  irreconcileable 
camps.  On  the  one  side  we  have  M.  d'Hericault,  who 
looks  upon  him  as  a  fiend  in  human  shape  ;  Michelet, 
who  holds  much  the  same  opinion,  but  expresses  it  with 
greater  art ;  M.  Taine,  who  has  invented  the  "  Croco- 
dile "  epithet,  which  is  as  wearisome  as  that  of  "  Sea- 
Green  Incorruptible."  On  the  other  side  we  have  Louis 
Blanc,  who  greatly  admires  Robespierre  ;  M.  Hamel,  who 
adores  him  ;  M.  Vermorel,  who  does  the  like.  Hovering 
between  the  two  factions  flits  M.  Scherer,  desperately 
anxious  to  be  impartial,  succeeding  on  the  whole  fairly 
well.  But  if  France  is  divided  in  opinion,  so  too  is  Eng- 
land. There  are  only  four  important  expressions  of 
opinion  that  have  been  uttered  upon  Robespierre  in 
England,  only  four  serious  studies  of  his  life  made  in 
England.  These  are  Bronterre  O'Brien's  "Life  of 
Robespierre,"  of  which  only  one  volume  was  ever  print- 
ed and  which  is  now  an  exceedingly  rare  book  ;  George 
Henry  Lewes's  "  Life,"  also  exceedingly  rare  ;  Mr.  John 
Morley's  essay  in  the  first  volume  of  his  "  Miscellanies," 
and,  of.  course,  Carlyle's  "  Revolution."  Of  these  four 
works,  the  first  two  may  be  classed  as  for  Robespierre, 
the  last  two  as  against  him. 

What  astonishing  differences  of  opinion  these  four 
men  represent !  Carlyle,  writing  less  than  half  a  cen- 
tury after  the  meeting  of  the  States-General,  sees  only 
that  a  "  stricter  man,  according  to  his  Formula,  to  his 
Credo  and  Cant,  of  probities,  benevolences,  pleasures-of- 
virtue,  and  such  like,  lived  not  in  that  age,"  sees  only 
"  a  man  fitted,  in  some  luckier  settled  age,  to  have  be- 
come one  of  those  incorruptible  barren  Pattern-Figures, 
and  have  had  marble  tablets  and  funeral  sermons," 


480  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXX. 

Wild  Bronterre  O'Brien,  impassioned  Chartist  that  he 
is,  sees  in  Robespierre  little  less  than  divinity.  "The 
more  virtuous,  the  more  magnanimous,  the  more  god- 
like I  prove  Robespierre's  conduct  to  have  been,  the 
greater  will  be  the  horror  in  which  his  memory  will  be 
held  by  the  upper  and  the  middle  classes."  Mr.  George 
Henry  Lewes  does  not  share  this  passion,  but  he  counts 
as  an  admirer,  a  warm  admirer  of  Robespierre.  From 
among  the  turbulent  spirits  of  the  Revolution  he  sees 
three  men  issuing  into  something  like  sovereignty — 
Mirabeau,  Robespierre,  Napoleon.  To  him  Robespierre 
is  the  man  "  who  in  his  heart  believed  the  gospel  pro- 
claimed by  the  Revolution  to  be  the  real  gospel  of 
Christianity,  and  who  vainly  endeavored  to  arrest  anar- 
chy and  to  shape  society  into  order  by  means  of  his 
convictions." 

Mr.  John  Morley's  judgment  jumps  rather  with  that 
of  Carlyle  than  with  the  gi'eater  and  the  less  enthusi- 
asms of  Bronterre  O'Brien  and  of  Lewes.  Mr.  Morley 
seems  to  be  endowed  with  a  fatal  unreadiness  to  admire 
anything  or  anybody  in  the  past  except  the  writings  of 
Mr.  Burke  and  Mr.  Burke  himself.  He  is  particularly 
bitter  against  Robespierre,  partly,  we  cannot  help  feel- 
ing, because,  having  been  so  often  himself  accused  of 
revolutionary  sympathies,  he  wishes  to  show  how  scru- 
pulously impartial,  how  finely  analytical  he  can  be  in 
dealing  with  a  great  revolutionary.  To  Mr.  Morley, 
Robespierre  is  only  a  man  of  "profound  and  pitiable 
incompetence,"  a  man  without  a  social  conception,  with- 
out a  policy.  He  finds  a  curious  study  in  "  the  pedant, 
cursed  with  the  ambition  to  be  a  ruler  of  men."  Pie 
sees  in  Robespierre  "a  kind  of  spinster"  in  whom 
"spasmodical  courage  and  timidity  ruled  by  rapid 
turns,"  Finally,  Robespierre  is  always  and  ever  pres- 


1789.  DEFECT  OF   MORLEY.  481 

ent  to  Mr.  Morley's  mind  as  the  man  of  the  Law  of 
Prairial.  It  is  the  great  defect  of  Mr.  Morley's  method 
that  it  is  entirely  lacking  in  dramatic  sympathy.  Dra- 
matic sympathy  is  one  of  the  most  essential  qualities,  if 
it  is  not  the  most  essential  quality,  for  the  proper  ap- 
preciation of  history.  Mr.  Morley  is  curiously  without 
it.  If  a  man  does  not  act  under  all  circumstances  as 
Mr.  Morley  thinks  he  ought  to  have  acted,  as  Mr.  Mor- 
ley thinks  that  he  himself  would  have  acted,  then  Mr. 
Morley  has  no  patience  with  him,  and  vituperates  him 
from  a  severe  vocabulary.  Let  us  hope  that  we  may  at 
least  try  to  get  nearer  to  the  real  Robespierre,  the  man 
who  is  neither  the  god  of  Bronterre  O'Brien,  the  fiend 
in  human  shape  of  D'Hericault,  nor  the  pedantic  "  spin- 
ster" of  Mr.  John  Morley. 
I.— 31 


482  THE  FKENCII   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXI. 


CHAPTER  XXXI. 

SOME    MINOR    CHARACTERS. 

THE  two  most  conspicuous  figures  in  that  assembly 
were,  as  we  have  seen,  Mirabeau  and  Equality  Orleans. 
The  least  conspicuous,  most  important  figure  was  that 
of  the  respectable  advocate  from  Arras,  who  is  looking 
at  the  scene  with  short-sighted  blue  eyes  that  peer 
through  spectacles,  Maximilien  Robespierre.  Between 
these  two  extremes  are  clustered  the  rest  of  the  dramatis 
personce,  the  minor  characters  of  the  play,  some  of  whom 
are  to  play  very  important  parts,  some  of  whom  do  lit- 
tle more  than  carry  a  banner  or  bring  on  a  letter.  Cer- 
tain of  these  we  are  already  familiar  with,  Mounier,  for 
example,  and  Malouet,  whom  we  have  met  at  Vizilles  ; 
these  are  among  the  important ;  others  that  are  of  much 
less  importance  we  shall  meet  with  later  on  as  they  rise 
up  to  take  their  cues  in  the  great  tragedy.  But  there 
are  some  few,  half  a  dozen  or  so,  whom  we  may  as  well 
become  acquainted  with  at  once — most  notably  a  cer- 
tain good-looking  young  man  of  grave,  reserved  bearing 
who  is  sitting  among  the  Third  Estate.  We  have  heard 
of  him  before  down  in  Dauphine  ;  his  name  is  Barnave. 

Among  those  present  there  was  no  one  of  nobler 
nature  than  the  young  Barnave.  Still  very  young,  the 
gravity  and  stillness  of  his  life  had  marked  him  out  as 
a  man  from  whom  much  was  to  be  expected.  He  was 
in  many  ways  a  typical  representative  of  that  semi- 
pagan  philosophy  which  preceded  the  Revolution,  and 


1701-93.  BARXAVE.  483 

which  modelled  itself  upon  the  wisdom  of  Greece  and 
the  composed  austerity  of  Rome.  We  have  seen  al- 
ready the  part  he  played  down  in  Dauphine  by  the  side 
of  Mounier  in  that  minor  Revolution  which  by  its  ex- 
ample and  its  inspiration  was  so  momentous.  He  knew 
now  that  he  was  appearing  on  a  greater  stage  ;  he  longed 
to  play  a  greater  part.  We  can  even  read  his  thoughts 
in  those  'early  hours.  "  My  personal  position,"  he  has 
written,  "  in  those  first  moments  resembled  that  of  no 
one  else.  While  I  was  too  young  to  dream  for  a  mo- 
ment of  guiding  such  an  august  assembly,  that  very 
fact  gave  a  greater  security  to  those  who  aspired  to  be- 
come leaders.  No  one  discerned  in  me  a  rival ;  every- 
one might  detect  in  me  a  disciple  or  a  useful  ally."  But 
the  young  Barnave  was  ambitious.  He  wished  to  be 
neither  the  disciple  nor  the  subservient  ally.  He  chafed 
against  that  title  of  aide-de-camp  of  Mounier  which  pub- 
lic opinion  gave  him.  As  he  sat  there,  gravely  stoical 
of  exterior,  internally  restless,  wondering,  and  aspiring, 
his  eyes  must  have  rested  now  and  again  upon  the 
queen's  face,  rested,  and  no  doubt  admired,  and  read 
nothing  there  of  her  fate  and  of  his. 

Barnave,  Mounier's  colleague  in  the  Dauphine  depu- 
tation, was  born  at  Grenoble  on  October  22,  1761.  His 
family  were  of  the  middle  class  ;  his  father  a  well-to-do 
and  respected  lawyer.  From  his  earliest  years  the 
young  Barnave  was  trained  to  a  high  morality,  to  a 
grave  and  noble  survey  of  life.  His  father  and  mother 
were  Protestants,  and  Barnave  was  educated  in  the 
Protestant  faith  ;  but  his  own  religious  convictions  ap- 
pear to  have  been  finally  moulded  by  a  kind  of  medley 
of  the  philosophy  of  the  old  classic  world  and  the  phi- 
losophy of  his  own  time.  An  episode  of  his  childhood 
had  a  curious  effect  upon  the  direction  of  his  life.  His 


484  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXI. 

mother  one  day  took  him  to  the  theatre.  There  was 
but  one  box  vacant,  and  Madame  Barnave  entered  it. 
Presently  the  director  of  the  theatre  came  to  Madame 
Barnave,  informed  her  that  the  place  she  occupied  was 
wanted  for  a  friend  of  the  governor  of  the  province,  the 
Duke  de  Tonnerre,  and  asked  her  to  withdraw.  Ma- 
dame de  Barnave,  a  woman  of  firm  principle,  a  woman 
not  easily  alarmed,  refused  to  go.  The  director  retired 
and  gave  place  to  the  officer  of  the  guard,  who  repeated, 
peremptorily,  the  governor's  order.  Madame  de  Bar- 
nave  quietly,  steadily  refused  to  obey.  The  officer,  in 
obedience  to  the  governor's  order,  returned  with  a  rein- 
forcement of  four  fusiliers  to  eject  Madame  Barnave  by 
force.  By  this  time  the  theatre  was  in  an  uproar.  The 
occupants  of  the  pit,  furious  at  the  insult  that  was  being 
offered  to  one  of  the  most  prominent  and  most  popular 
citizenesses  of  Grenoble,  were  menacing  the  soldiers, 
and  there  was  every  prospect  of  the  theatre  becoming 
the  scene  of  a  serious  riot  when  Barnave,  the  father, 
who  had  been  communicated  with,  arrived.  He  took 
his  wife  by  the  arm  and  left  the  theatre,  saying  in  a 
loud  tone  of  voice,  "  I  go  by  the  order  of  the  governor." 
The  public  immediately  espoused  the  quarrel.  It  was 
solemnly  agreed  that  the  theatre  should  be  taboo  until 
the  offence  was  atoned  for.  Taboo  accordingly  the 
theatre  was,  until  at  last,  tired  of  months  of  empty 
benches,  the  manager  came  to  Madame  Barnave,  and 
by  his  entreaties  persuaded  her  to  appear  once  more  at 
the  play-house,  and  so  restore  to  it  its  lost  credit.  The 
episode  made  a  profound  impression  upon  the  mind  of 
the  childish  Barnave.  He  saw  his  mother  publicly  in- 
sulted by  the  representative  of  the  dominant  order,  the 
inequality  of  social  life  was  revealed  to  him,  and  he 
swore  his  oath  of  Hannibal  that  he  would  never  rest 


1761-89.      THE  STILLXESS  OF  BARNAVE'S  YOUTH.          485 

until  he  had  "raised  the  class  to  which  he  belonged 
from  the  state  of  humiliation  to  which  it  appeared  to 
be  condemned."  So  the  influence  of  a  ludicrous  and 
offensive  Duke  of  Thunder  had  its  share  in  moulding 
the  destinies  of  the  Revolution.  The  child  in  the 
theatre,  shamed  and  angry  at  the  unwarrantable  insult 
offered  to  his  mother,  grew  into  the  man  who  at  Dau- 
phine  laid  the  axe  to  the  root  of  the  tree,  who  at  Ver- 
sailles watched  it  tremble  to  its  fall. 

From  father  and  from  mother  the  young  Barnave  in- 
herited a  proud,  courageous  nature.  As  a  lad  of  sixteen 
he  fought  a  duel  for  the  sake  of  a  younger  brother 
whom  he  tenderly  loved,  and  was  wounded,  well-nigh 
killed.  A  little  later  the  brother  for  whom  he  had 
fought  so  chivalrously  died,  and  Barnave  expressed  for 
him  a  profound  regret  which  breathes  much  of  the  an- 
tique spirit,  an  Attic  sadness  of  final. separation.  "You 
were  one  of  those  whom  I  had  set  apart  from  the  world 
and  had  placed  the  closest  to  my  heart.  Alas  !  you  are 
now  not  more  than  a  memory,  than  a  passing  thought ; 
the  flying  leaf,  the  impalpable  shadow,  are  less  attenu- 
ated than  you."  These  might  be  the  words  of  some 
plaintive  threnody  in  the  Greek  Anthology,  in  their  re- 
signed despair,  in  their  sombre  recognition  of  the  noth- 
ingness of  life. 

The  gravity  which  chai'acterized  Barnave  set  the  seal 
of  manhood  upon  his  youth  when  that  youth  was  still 
little  more  than  boyhood.  He  had  always  sought  the 
companionship,  the  friendship  of  those  who  were  older, 
wiser  than  himself.  The  ordinary  pleasures  of  youth 
seem  to  have  had  but  few  attractions  for  him.  He  was 
serious,  with  a  kind  of  decorous  gravity  which  might 
have  belonged  to  some  Roman  youth;  he  was  ambitious; 
he  was  completely  master  of  himself.  His  thoughts 


486  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXI. 

turned  to  literature,  but  it  was  his  father's  wish  that 
he  should  study  law,  and  in  obedience  to  that  wish  he 
worked  hard  and  well.  Constitutional  law  attracted 
him  profoundly ;  he  studied  all  questions  of  government 
with  zeal ;  in  the  year  1783  he  delivered  an  address  upon 
the  necessity  for  the  division  of  powers  in  the  body  pol- 
itic. When  the  struggle  began  in  Dauphine  the  young 
Barnave  was  ripe  to  take  his  share  in  the  struggle. 

Near  to  Mirabeau  according  to  pictured  history,  not 
near  to  him  in  fact,  shows  a  man  of  forty  years,  who 
was  beginning  to  be  talked  about,  the  Abbe  Sieyes. 
Emmanuel  Joseph  Sieyes,  born  at  Frejus,  in  the  Var, 
on  May  3,  1748,  had  lived  these  first  forty  years  of  his 
life  without  making  any  profound  impression  upon  the 
world,  or  even  upon  France.  At  forty  a  man  might, 
most  unreasonably,  begin  to  despair  of  fame,  if  he  has 
as  yet  worn  no  feather  from  her  wings.  It  certainly 
would  have  been  -most  unreasonable  for  Sieyes  to  de- 
spair; for,  though  he  knew  it  not,  his  life  was  not  half 
lived  yet,  and  fame  was  waiting  for  him  at  the  next 
turning.  Some  keen  eyes  had  noted  him  already  ;  the 
keen  eyes  of  the  young  Barnave  especially.  It  was  the 
earliest  dream  of  the  young  Barnave  during  those  first 
days  of  States-General  to  bring  Mounier  and  Sieyes  into 
alliance — a  desperate  enterprise,  as  easy  as  to  solder  close 
impossibilities  and  to  make  them  kiss.  The  young  Bar- 
nave  was  strong  and  patient,  but  the  strength  of  the 
Titans  and  the  patience  beloved  of  the  gods  could  not 
suffice  to  bring  a  Mounier  and  a  Sieyes  into  union  of 
thought  and  union  of  action.  During  his  forty  years  of 
pilgrimage  he  had  moulded  his  own  mind,  and  mapped 
out,  as  far  as  man  may,  the  steerage  of  his  course  into 
the  future.  Sprung  from  an  honest  bourgeois  stock, 
his  youth  promptings  made  him  eager  to  enter  the  mili- 


1748-1836.  PHILOSOPHIC   SIEVES.  487 

tary  service,  either  in  the  artillery  or  the  engineers. 
But  he  was  sickly  of  body,  and  his  family,  in  his  own 
angry  words,  "doomed  him"  to  enter  the  Church. 
Trained  in  his  childhood  by  the  Jesuits,  he  was  sent 
when  scarcely  fifteen  years  old  to  Paris  to  complete  his 
theological  studies  at  Saint-Sulpice.  At  Saint-Sulpice 
he  worked  hard,  grappling,  with  strenuous,  inquiring 
spirit,  at  all  sorts  of  topics  that  were  not  set  down  for 
him  in  the  scheme  of  Saint-Sulpice.  In  fact,  the  youth- 
ful Sieyes  was  not  a  persona  grata  in  the  eyes  of  Saint- 
Sulpice  authority.  He  went  in  for  advanced  philosoph- 
ical speculation,  studied  profoundly  without  accepting 
his  Encyclopaedists  and  his  Rousseau,  read  much  and 
wrote  much,  and  in  his  writings  permitted  himself  much 
freedom  of  opinion.  At  length  Saint-Sulpice,  shifting 
from  tacit  to  pronounced  disapproval,  suggested  plainly 
to  the  philosophic  Sieyes  that  there  must  be  on  the  face 
of  the  earth  other  institutions  more  suited  to  his  peculiar 
temper  than  Saint-Sulpice.  At  all  events,  Saint-Sulpice 
cared  to  shelter  him  no  more,  and  Sieyes,  acting  upon 
the  hint,  withdrew  himself  to  the  Seminary  of  Saint- 
Firmin,  and  there  completed  the  period  necessary  for 
the  Sorbonne  degree.  In  time  he  obtained  a  canonry 
in  Brittany;  later,  he  was  made  Vicar-General  and  Chan- 
cellor of  the  diocese  of  Chartres,  and  became  a  member 
of  the  Council  of  the  Clergy  in  France.  It  was  in  1788 
that  he  first  came  conspicuously  forward  as  a  politician. 
His  famous  pamphlet,  "  Qu'est-ce  que  le  Tiers  3£tat  ?" 
had  a  tremendous  success.  "  What  is  the  Third  Estate  ?" 
asked  Sieyes,  and  answered  himself,  "Everything." 
"  What  has  it  been  till  now  ?"  "  Nothing  !"  "  What 
does  it  desire  to  be  ?"  "  Something  !"  Such  a  politi- 
cian was  naturally  too  advanced  for  the  clerical  order; 
they  did  not  elect  him  to  the  States-General.  But  the 


488  ME  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OIL  XXXL 

Paris  electors  had  Sieyes  in  their  eye  and  in  their  mind, 
and  when  they  were  electing  their  deputies  they  in- 
cluded him  in  the  number.  Some  slight  discussion  was 
raised  when  his  name  was  proposed.  "  How,"  it  was 
asked,  "could  a  member  of  the  clerical  order  be  proper- 
ly chosen  to  represent  the  Third  Estate  ?"  The  point 
was  not  pressed.  The  services  Sieyes  had  rendered  and 
his  advanced  liberalism  were  his  best  advocates,  and  he 
was  elected  the  twentieth  and  last  deputy  for  Paris. 

A  grave,  respectable  man  of  nearly  fifty  years  of  age, 
and  wearing  them  well,  with  a  certain,  steady  dogma- 
tism in  his  bearing,  such  was  Malouet,  who  had  been 
many  things  and  done  many  things  in  his  half-century. 
Malouet  was  born  at  Riom,  in  Auvergne,  on  February 
11,  1740,  of  a  family  of  humble  provincial  magistrates. 
Educated  by  an  uncle,  an  amiable  and  accomplished 
Oratorian,  at  the  College  of  Juilly,  there  was  at  one 
time  a  chance  that  Malouet  might  have  entered  the 
priesthood — and  indeed  he  actually  wore  the  ecclesias- 
tical habit  for  a  season,  but  only  for  a  season.  Then  he 
turned  to  law  and  to  literature,  passed  his  legal  exam- 
inations, wrote  a  chilly  classical  play  and  a  couple  of 
chilly  comedies.  When  he  was  only  eighteen  years  old 
he  was  attached  to  the  embassy  of  the  Count  de  Merle 
at  Lisbon,  and  in  Lisbon  he  passed  eighteen  fruitful 
months,  learning  much  of  the  ways  of  statesmen,  and 
confirming  in  his  young  mind  that  judicial  way  of  esti- 
mating men  and  things  which  wras  all  his  life  his  char- 
acteristic. When  the  Count  de  Merle  came  back  to 
Paris,  Malouet  was  for  a  time  attached  in  a  kind  of 
nominal  post  to  the  Marshal  de  Broglie's  army,  and  saw 
battles  lost  and  won.  In  1763,  when  peace  was  de- 
clared, Malouet's  friends  found  for  him  another  post, 
newly  created,  that  of  Inspector  of  Embarkations  for 


1V40-1814.  MAtOttfif.  489 

the  Colonies.  For  two  years  he  filled  this  office  at 
Rochefort,  always  acquiring  tact,  always  forming  pro- 
found judgments — always  methodizing  his  mind  and 
adding  to  his  store  of  knowledge.  By  this  time  De 
Choiseul  had  started  his  mad  scheme  for  an  European 
settlement  in  Guayana,  which  was  to  cost  France  four- 
teen thousand  men  and  thirty  millions  of  money. 

Malouet  was  sent  to  Saint-Domingo  as  a  sub-commis- 
sioner, and  for  five  years  struggled  with  an  impossible 
colonial  system.  By  his  desperate  determination  to  be 
impartial  he  pleased  neither  the  blacks  nor  the  planter 
class.  It  was  always  more  or  less  his  lot,  says  Sainte- 
Beuve  dryly,  to  please  nobody.  After  five  years,  Ma- 
louet, who  was  now  married  and  well-to-do,  found  the 
climate  too  bad  for  his  health,  and  he  returned  to  France, 
where  he  exercised  much  influence  in  the  Admiralty 
departments.  After  three  years  he  set  out  again  in 
1776  for  French  Guayana.  Those  three  years  were  im- 
portant years  for  Malouet.  He  mingled  much  in  the 
society  of  men  of  letters,  was  on  intimate  terms  with 
D'Alembert,  Diderot,  Condorcet,  and  the  eccentric,  dif- 
fuse Abbe  Raynal.  By  his  marriage  Malouet  gained, 
through  the  Chabanons,  the  happiest  insight  into  the 
most  cultured  literary  society  of  the  hour,  and  gained 
also  that  certain  measure  of  literary  skill  which  char- 
acterizes his  own  writings.  He  left  this  pleasant  literary 
life  in  1776,  to  return  to  Guayana;  he  passed  two  years 
there,  and  was  on  his  way  home  when  he  was  captured 
by  an  English  privateer  and  carried  to  England,  where 
he  was  well  treated  and  not  detained  long.  In  1781  he 
was  made  intendant  at  Toulon,  and  at  Toulon  he  re- 
mained for  eight  years  an  ideal  man  of  affairs.  Here  it 
was  that  the  Abbe  Raynal,  paying  him  a  flying  visit, 
finally  stopped  for  three  years,  and  might  have  stopped 


FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XXXI. 

longer,  so  Malouet  declares,  if  he  had  wished  it.  When 
the  elections  for  the  States-General  began  in  1789,  the 
electors  of  Riora  chose  him  for  their  delegate,  and  he 
was  seated  now  in  the  great  hall  watching  his  colleagues, 
feeding  his  suspicions  of  Mirabeau. 

A  man  of  whom  we  have  heard  already  is  Joseph 
Mounier,  who  handled  the  agitation  in  Dauphine  so 
skilfully,  and  whose  name  was  so  influential  in  the  days 
when  the  States-General  were  being  elected.  His  inti- 
mate interest  in  England,  his  knowledge  of  the  English 
language  and  of  English  institutions,  seem  to  have  lent 
something  of  an  English  character  to  his  face,  which 
would  have  seemed  almost  more  appropriate  at  West- 
minster than  at  Versailles.  Jean  Joseph  Mounier  was 
born  on  November  12,  1758,  at  Grenoble,  in  a  house  in 
the  Grande  Rue,  where  a  not  altogether  accurate  tablet 
now  commemorates  the  fact,  and  describes  him  as  hav- 
ing been  the  President  of  the  National  Assembly.  His 
father  was  a  cloth  merchant,  with  a  modest  fortune  and 
seven  children.  An  uncle,  a  cure  of  Rives,  took  charge 
of  young  Joseph's  education,  and  the  story  goes  that 
the  very  severity  of  the  cure's  ideas  of  education  planted 
in  the  boy's  mind  the  ideas  of  liberty.  He  went  after- 
wards to  the  College  Royal-Dauphine  at  Grenoble,  where 
the  gravity  and  stillness  of  his  youth  earned  him  the 
nickname  of  Cato.  But  for  all  his  Cato  gravity  he  did 
not  escape  expulsion  from  his  college.  He  had  the  au- 
dacity to  write  "  Nugae  sublimes  "  at  the  head  of  a  page 
of  metaphysics.  This  trifling  with  great  things  was  not 
to  be  tolerated;  the  outraged  spirit  of  Royal-Dauphine 
could  only  be  pacified  by  the  withdrawal  of  Mounier. 
A  fanciful  legend  has  it  that  Mounier,  after  leaving  col- 
lege, dreamed  of  the  career  of  arms,  and  finding  that 
that  career  was  practically  closed  to  one  who  was  not 


1747-1814.  MOUNIER.— DUBOIS-CRANC^.  401 

of  noble  birth,  he  swore  his  oath  of  Hannibal  against 
the  privileges  of  the  noble  classes.  Anyhow,  he  took 
np  the  law,  married  under  somewhat  romantic  condi- 
tions a  sister  of  one  of  his  friends,  Philippine  Borel ; 
and  in  1783  settled  down  to  what  promised  to  be  a 
peaceful  country  life.  But  a  chance  meeting  with  some 
English  tourists  led  to  a  friendship,  to  a  correspondence, 
to  a  study  of  the  English  language,  of  the  English  con- 
stitution. Mounier  began  to  follow  with  impassioned 
interest  the  debates  in  the  British  House  of  Commons. 
He  studied  the  theories  of  government  and  its  prac- 
tice in  many  countries.  When  the  difficulty  broke  out 
in  Dauphine,  Mounier  was  ready,  an  experienced  and 
thoughtful  man,  to  come  to  the  front  and  to  take  his 
part.  As  he  sat  now  in  the  States-General,  he  thought 
that  destiny  reserved  for  him  still  greater  deeds.  He 
had  to  eat  the  bitter  fruit  of  the  tree  of  disappoint- 
ment. 

Yonder  soldierly  man  of  two  -  and  -  forty,  with  the 
large  body  and  the  wide,  smiling  eyes,  the  curled  hair 
and  commanding  profile,  is  Dubois-Crance,  who  is  yet 
to  be  much  heard  of.  He  lives  again  for  us  in  David's 
likeness.  We  see  the  great  neck,  powerful  under  the 
loose  shirt  that  is  opened  as  if  to  allow  him  freer  play, 
the  great  forehead  from  which  the  curling  hair  goes 
boldly  back,  the  firm  mouth,  the  large,  shapely  nose,  the 
resolute  chin,  the  commanding  eye.  He  was  evidently  a 
man  meant  for  much.  There  were  plenty  named  Dubois, 
or  Duboys,  in  France,  according  to  a  biographer  of  Du- 
bois-Crance, but  this  Dubois  came  from  Champagne, 
and  inherited  the  fine  and  slightly  mocking  spirit  which 
was  said  to  be  a  Champagne  birthright.  He  was  an 
eager,  even  excitable  speaker,  foaming  up  like  his  na- 
tive juices,  that  "foaming  grape  of  Eastern  France" 


492  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.         OH.  xxxi. 

which  an  English  poet  has  celebrated,  and  settling  down 
speedily  again  as  the  sparkling  champagne  settles  down 
after  its  first  petulant  exhilaration.  Born  at  Charle- 
ville  on  October  17,  1747,  the  youngest  son  of  the  In- 
tendant  Germain  Dubois,  De  Crance  received  his  educa- 
tion from  the  fathers  of  the  Charleville  College.  Child 
of  a  warlike  breed,  Edmond  Louis  Alexis  Dubois-Crance 
longed  to  follow  the  career  of  arms. 

When  he  was  little  more  than  fourteen  years  old  he 
was  allowed,  by  a  special  dispensation  as  to  age,  to  en- 
ter the  first  company  of  those  musketeers  of  the  king's 
guard  whose  name  is  chiefly  dear  to  the  world  for  the 
sake  of  D'Artagnan.  In  the  ranks  of  the  musketeers 
the  young  Dubois-Crance  learned  his  trade,  endured  the 
badinage  of  his  brother-officers  over  certain  attacks  upon 
the  family  right  to  titles  of  nobility,  and  slowly  formed 
his  character,  very  much  as  an  armorer  might  forge 
the  sword  he  wore  at  his  side.  He  had  a  modest  fort- 
une from  his  father,  which  was  lucky,  for,  in  an  age 
when  all  advancement  went  by  favor,  Dubois-Crance 
was  the  last  man  in  the  world  to  advance.  He  could 
not  and  did  not  curry  favor.  He  made  a  rich  and  hap- 
py marriage  in  the  December  of  1772.  In  1775,  when 
the  musketeers  were  disbanded,  he  retired  on  a  pension 
and  with  the  title  of  officer.  In  1776  he  retired  to 
Chalons,  busy  and  happy  with  the  cares  of  his  books, 
and  the  joys  of  his  well-stored  library,  and  his  literary 
labors.  In  1789  he  was  chosen  deputy  of  the  Third 
Estate  for  the  bailiwick  of  Vitry-le-Fran9ois,  and  came 
up  to  Paris  in  the  end  of  April  prepared  to  act  in  all 
obedience  to  the  cahier  which  set  forth  the  remon- 
strances, plaints,  and  griefs  of  the  people  of  Vitry-le- 
Franyois — a  cahier  which  owed  its  shape  and  purport 
largely  to  his  own  inspiration.  It  has  been  no  less 


1747-1814.      DUBOIS-CRANC&— FATHER  GERARD.  493 

happily  than  truly  said  of  him  that  while  he  was  at 
this  time  Voltairean  in  mind,  deist  by  conviction,  Cath- 
olic by  education,  Gallican  like  Richelieu  and  all  the 
great  Frenchmen  of  the  eighteenth  century,  Royalist 
by  habitude,  Dubois-Crance  was  a  Republican  unawares, 
like  all  the  Constitutionalists,  who  were  anxious  to  set 
the  nation  and  the  law  above  the  monarchy  while  still 
preserving  the  concord  between  them.  Before  all  things 
Dubois-Crance  was  a  patriot — the  patriot  as  defined  by 
Brissot  de  Warville,  the  man  who  wishes  absolute  lib- 
erty for  all  men. 

One  other  interesting  figure  we  may  pause  for  a  mo- 
ment to  glance  at,  a  unique  figure. 

In  Augustin  Challamel's  curious  and  interesting  book, 
"  Histoire-Musee  de  la  Republique  Fran9aise,"  we  get 
a  portrait  of  Michel  Gerard,  the  only  man  in  the  whole 
Third  Estate  who  insisted  upon  stumping  about  Ver- 
sailles in  his  native  peasant  garb.  He  looks  a  sturdy, 
honest  fellow,  with  his  solid,  shaven  face  and  long  hair, 
and  his  simple  farmer's  clothes  in  their  quaint  Bas- 
Breton  cut.  He  was  an  honest,  sturdy  fellow,  with  no 
great  admiration  for  the  bulk  of  his  colleagues,  with 
no  overweening  admiration  for  himself.  His  fifty-two 
years  of  life  had  scarcely  prepared  him  for  the  things 
to  be,  but  he  faced  all  things  coolly. 

There  are  many  others  in  that  brilliant  crowd  on 
whom  the  mind  lingers,  men  distinguished  already,  or 
who  shall  yet  be  distinguished.  But  they  will  come 
before  us  in  their  due  time  ;  for  the  moment  our  eyes, 
as  fanciful  spectators  of  that  great  scene,  have  looked 
upon  some  of  the  most  important  of  its  players. 


494  TUB  FREISJ1I  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 


CHAPTER  XXXII. 

PEOPLE    IN   THE    STREETS. 

LET  us  believe  that  it  is  in  our  power,  after  having 
witnessed  in  imagination  that  eventful  assembly  in  the 
Salle  des  Menus,  to  pass  out  from  thence  and  wander 
off  to  Paris,  and  make  acquaintance  with  one  or  two 
persons  whom  we  may  assume  to  have  been  abroad  that 
day.  The  people  in  the  Salle  des  Menus  at  Versailles 
were  vastly  important  people,  and  yet  there  were  some 
walking  in  the  streets  that  day  who  were  destined  to 
play  the  leading  parts  in  the  great  drama  upon  which 
the  curtain  had  just  been  rung  up. 

One  of  the  strange  chances  of  history  associates  a 
momentous  name  with  the  time.  At  the  very  time 
when  the  States-General  wei'e  thus  coming  together,  to 
mix  but  not  to  combine,  there  appeared  in  Paris  a  vol- 
ume of  verse.  The  volume  had  no  connection  with  the 
new  political  movement :  it  had  no  literary  success ;  it 
did  not  deserve  any.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  a 
new  "  Iliad,"  a  new  "  Hamlet,"  or  a  new  "  Avare " 
would  have  attracted  much  public  attention  in  the 
week  which  saw  the  assembling  of  the  States-General. 
And  yet  the  volume  had  its  importance,  for  it  brought 
before  the  world,  for  the  first  time,  a  name  that  was  to 
be  heard  much  of  in  the  succeeding  years.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  some  of  the  members  of  the  States-General 
may  have  carried  a  volume  of  the  book  in  their  pockets 
as  they  lay  at  Versailles.  Mirabeau  may  have  glanced 


1789.  "ORGANT."  495 

scornfully  at  it ;  it  may  have  stirred  for  a  moment  the 
spoiled  blood  of  the  Duke  of  Orleans,  or  been  smiled 
at  by  the  Bishop  of  Autun.  It  was  called  "Organt." 
It  was  a  coarse,  dreary  imitation  of  Voltaire's  abomina- 
ble "  Pucelle."  It  professed  offensively  to  be  printed 
"  Au  Vatican  ;"  it  bore  for  preface  the  simple  words, 
"  J'ai  vingt  ans  :  j'ai  mal  fait :  je  pourrai  f aire  mieux." 
Its  author's  name  was  Saint-Just. 

"  Organt "  is  now  one  of  the  curiosities  of  the  bibli- 
ophile ;  it  is  scarcely  sufficiently  well  known  to  be  called 
a  curiosity  of  literature.  It  is  scarce — few  people  pos- 
sess it ;  it  is  dull — few  people  have  read  it :  even  its 
cold  licentiousness  is  not  sufficiently  animated  to  make 
it  attractive  to  the  swillers  at  the  pornographic  sty. 
It  is  not  worth  wasting  half  an  hour  or  half  a  minute 
over.  There  are,  indeed,  some  thick-and-thin  admirers 
of  Saint-Just,  hagiologists  of  the  mountain,  fanatical 
worshippers  to  whom  all  the  deeds  of  their  hero  are 
alike  heroic,  who  profess  to  find  grace,  charm,  humor 
in  this  frigid,  drear  indecency.  Critics  of  such  a  tem- 
per would  consider  that  Richelieu  was  eminently  qual- 
ified for  the  drama,  that  Cicero  was  a  fine  poet,  that 
Frederick  the  Great  was  the  literary  peer  of  Voltaire. 
It  might,  we  should  imagine,  be  possible  to  admire 
Saint- Just  without  of  necessity  admiring  "Organt." 
But  the  preface  was  a  kind  of  pithy  "  apologia  pro 
vita  sua"  a  memoir  in  little.  He  was  twenty  years 
of  age  ;  he  had  done  badly,  very  badly  indeed,  but 
there  was  the  stuff  for  better  things  within  him.  It 
behooves  us  to  be  careful,  in  estimating  the  career  of 
such  a  man  as  Saint-Just,  not  to  let  ourselves  be  led 
away  too  much  by  the  actions  of  his  youth.  His  mo- 
rality was  not  of  an  elevated  kind.  But  youth  is  not 
too  often  moral,  and  neither  the  traditions  nor  the  lit- 


49G  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 

erature  of  the  time  were  very  favorable'  to  a  high  Ro- 
man morality. 

There  was  some  excuse  to  be  made  for  Saint-Just. 
He  was  a  very  young  man,  of  the  kind  whom  Shake- 
speare's Aristotle  sets  apart  from  moral  philosophy  ;  he 
lived  in  an  age  which  had  a  marked  tenderness  for  the 
lightest,  even  the  loosest  of  verse.  At  this  very  time 
an  English  nobleman,  Lord  Pembroke,  then  abiding  in 
Venice,  could  think  of  no  better  way  of  employing  his 
means  and  leisure  and  delighting  his  friends  than  by 
reprinting  the  poems  in  Venetian  dialect  of  the  famous 
or  infamous  Giorgio  Baffo.  As  a  rare  book,  as  a  curi- 
ous book,  Lord  Pembroke's  Baffo  is  eagerly  sought 
after  by  collectors,  and  its  four  volumes  are  seldom 
met  with.  To  us  it  is  curious  because  it  bears  a  date 
destined  to  be  most  memorable  in  history.  On  the  title- 
page,  opposite  to  the  leering,  pimpled  visage  of  bad  old 
Baffo,  is  the  superscription,  "  Cosmopoli,  1789."  To  the 
nice  observer  of  mankind  there  is  something  peculiarly 
significant  in  the  juxtaposition  of  literary  events.  In 
the  same  year  the  representative  of  an  ancient  house 
— a  sufficiently  typical  representative,  too,  of  the  Old 
Order — devoted  a  portion  of  his  princely  revenues  to 
the  reprinting  of  an  exceedingly  profligate,  indecent 
old  rhymer ;  and  a  young,  daring,  penniless  democrat,  a 
representative  of  the  New  Order  in  its  most  advanced 
form,  made  his  appearance  before  the  world  as  the  au- 
thor of  an  indecent  poem.  Saint-Just  and  Lord  Pem- 
broke appear  before  the  world  in  the  same  volcano  year 
as  the  patrons  of  the  lewd. 

Over  Saint-Just,  as  over  Robespierre,  the  wildest  dis- 
putes have  arisen.  The  lovers  of  the  fiend-in-human- 
shape  theory  have  held  him  up  to  the  execration  of  the 
human  race  :  his  impassioned  admirers  have  exalted 


1767-94  SAINT- JUST.  497 

him,  endowed  him  with  the  attributes  of  a  young  arch- 
angel. M.  Ernest  Hamel,  the  enthusiastic  biographer 
of  Robespierre,  has  written  also  an  enthusiastic  biogra- 
phy of  Saint-Just,  much  of  which  is  devoted  to  contra- 
dicting the  biography  of  M.  Edouard  Fleury,  in  his  work 
"  Saint-Just  et  la  Terreur."  M.  A.  Cuvillier-Fleury,  the 
Academician,  sees  in  Saint-Just  only  a  politician  over- 
estimated by  the  misfortune  of  the  time,  a  man  of  let- 
ters gone  astray  in  great  affairs,  a  rhetorician  playing 
at  the  tribune,  an  artist  of  phrase,  of  language,  of  atti- 
tude, who  might  say,  like  Nero  dying  under  the  dagger 
of  Epaphroditus,  "  Qualis  artifex  pereo."  It  is  not  now 
the  time  to  estimate  the  character  of  Saint-Just.  He 
has  hardly  stepped  upon  the  political  stage;  he  is,  as  it 
were,  waiting  at  the  wings  to  take  his  call ;  let  it  be 
enough  to  see  what  his  life  has  been  up  to  this  time. 
Louis  Antoine  de  Saint-Just  was  born  on  August  25, 
1767,  at  Decize,  a  little  village  of  the  Nivernais.  His 
family  was  old,  but  plebeian  and  not  noble.  His  father 
was  a  veteran  soldier  who  had  earned  the  cross  of  Saint- 
Louis,  a  signal  distinction,  which  did  not,  however,  bring 
nobility  with  it.  In  1773  the  elder  Saint-Just  came  to 
Blerancourt;  in  1777  he  died,  leaving  a  wife  who  was 
still  young,  two  little  daughters,  and  Saint-Just,  then 
ten  years  old.  Madame  de  Saint-Just  was  devoted  to 
her  son,  who  seems  to  have  cordially  returned  her  affec- 
tion. From  her  he  got  that  melancholy  which  was  al- 
ways characteristic  of  him;  from  her  that  sweetness  of 
manner  which  even  his  enemies  recognized  and  made 
use  of  to  attack  him.  A  little  later  Saint-Just  was  sent 
to  Soissons,  to  the  college  of  Saint-Nicholas,  kept  by  the 
Oratorians,  where  he  seems  to  have  been  unhappy,  tur- 
bulent, even  mutinous,  but  an  ardent  lover  of  learning. 
Plato,  Montesquieu,  and  Rousseau  were  his  favorite 
I.— 32 


498  THE   FEENCII   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 

authors.  When  he  left  college,  he  went  for  a  time  to 
study  law  at  Rheims ;  but  he  did  not  complete  his 
studies,  and  he  returned  to  his  own  village  to  devote 
himself  to  literature.  Here  he  wrote  the  "  Organt," 
which  was  published  towards  the  end  of  1789,  after 
which  Saint  -  Just  himself  came  to  Paris.  Whatever 
opinion  may  be  formed  about  the  character  of  Saint- 
Just,  it  would  be  difficult  to  differ  about  the  charm  of 
his  personal  appearance.  If  the  portrait  given  by  M. 
Hamel,  from  the  pastel  belonging  to  Madame  Philippe 
le  Bas,  be  faithful,  he  had  a  face  of  singular  beauty, 
with  an  almost  feminine  charm  of  outline  and  an  air  of 
melancholy  sweetness.  The  large,  fine  eyes  seem  full 
of  tenderness;  the  mouth  is  delicately  shaped;  the  thick 
hair,  parted  in  the  middle  and  coming  low  over  the 
forehead,  frames  the  almost  girlish  comeliness  of  the 
face  in  its  mass.  It  is  certainly  a  most  attractive  face. 

There  was  a  man  in  Paris  at  this  time  who  was  des- 
tined to  be  even  more  wildly  adored  in  his  time,  and 
even  more  wildly  execrated  by  posterity,  than  Saint- 
Just,  or  even  than  Robespierre.  Probably  no  name, 
not  even  Nero's,  suggests  to  the  unreflecting  mind  more 
images  of  horror  than  the  name  of  Marat.  It  is  a  kind 
of  synonyme  for  insane  crime,  for  the  mad  passion  for 
blood,  for  mere  murderous  delirium.  What  we  said  of 
Saint- Just  we  must  say  again  for  Marat:  the  time  has 
not  come  for  us  to  attempt  an  estimate  of  his  character. 
He,  too,  waits  his  chance  to  make  an  appearance  in  the 
great  drama.  What  it  behooves  us  to  do  is  to  learn 
what  the  man's  way  of  life  had  been  until  this  year,  in 
which  for  the  fii'st  time  he  thrust  himself  into  the  great 
game  of  politics. 

Jean  Paul  Marat  was  born  on  May  24, 1743,  as  well 
as  can  be  ascertained,  at  Boudry  in  Neufchatel,  His 


1743-93.  MARAT.  499 

father  was  Jean  Paul  Marat,  of  Cagliari  in  Sardinia ; 
his  mother  was  Louise  Cabrol,  of  Geneva.  He  was  for- 
tunate enough — we  have  it  on  the  evidence  of  his  own 
record  —  to  receive  a  good  and  careful  education  at 
home.  Part  of  his  description  of  his  early  youth  reads 
like  a  similar  statement  made  by  a  very  different  man, 
Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus  :  "  J'ai  eu  1'avantage  de 
recevoir  une  education  tres  soignee  dans  la  maison  pater- 
nelle,  d'echapper  a  toutes  les  habitudes  vicieuses  de 
1'enfance  qui  enervent  et  degradent  1'homme,  d'eviter 
tous  les  ecarts  de  la  jeunesse  et  d'arriver  a  la  virilite 
sans  m'etre  jamais  abandonne  a  la  fougue  des  passions  : 
j'etais  vierge  a  vingt-et-un  ans."  We  learn  also  from 
Marat's  own  words  that  his  health  was  very  feeble  in 
his  early  years,  that  he  had  none  of  the  petulance  nor 
the  playfulness  of  ordinary  children.  Even  those  who 
are  entertained,  with  Mr.  George  Henry  Lewes,  by  think- 
ing of  Robespierre  as  a  gambolling  infant,  would  find 
it  hard  to  think  of  Marat  as  a  playful  child.  He  was 
docile  and  industrious ;  his  schoolmasters  could  always, 
he  says,  manage  him  by  kindness.  Once  a  master  beat 
him,  and  anger  at  an  unjust  humiliation  filled  the  young 
Marat  with  a  resolute  determination  never  to  return  to 
that  master's  tuition.  For  two  days  he  refused  food 
rather  than  obey;  then  when  his  parents,  in  an  attempt 
to  regain  their  compromised  authority,  locked  him  in 
his  room,  he  flung  himself  from  the  open  window  into 
the  street,  and  carried,  in  consequence,  a  scar  on  his 
forehead  for  life. 

He  was  always  consumed  by  a  thirst  for  glory,  to 
make  a  great  name,  to  be  famous  somehow,  some  way, 
but  at  all  events  to  be  famous.  The  various  phases 
which  this  thirst  for  fame  took  are  curious  enough. 
When  he  was  five  years  old  his  ambition  contented  it- 


500  TUB  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 

self  with  the  modest  desire  to  be  a  schoolmaster;  at 
fifteen  he  had  augmented  his  desires,  and  longed  to  be 
a  professor;  at  eighteen  he  wished  to  be  an  author;  at 
twenty  to  be  a  creative  genius.  "I  was  reflective  at 
fifteen,"  he  says,  "  an  observer  at  eighteen,  a  thinker  at 
twenty.  From  the  age  of  ten  I  contracted  the  habit  of 
the  studious  life ;  the  labor  of  the  mind  became  for  me 
a  veritable  necessity,  even  in  my  illnesses,  and  I  found 
my  dearest  pleasures  in  meditation.  Such  Nature  made 
me,  Nature  and  the  teachings  of  my  childhood;  circum- 
stances and  my  reflections  have  done  the  rest."  Marat 
seems  to  have  been  much  attached  to  his  mother,  and 
her  death  while  he  was  still  young  was  a  deep  grief  to 
him.  His  father,  a  medical  man  of  ability,  seems  to 
have  had  little  of  the  softer  parts  of  life.  He  wished 
his  son  to  be  a  learned  man,  and  in  a  great  degree  he 
had  his  wish. 

At  the  age  of  sixteen  Marat  found  himself  well  pre- 
pared for  the  struggle  of  life.  His  mother  was  dead  ; 
he  felt  that  he  should  be  no  longer  a  burden  on  his  fa- 
ther, on  his  younger  brother  and  two  sisters.  He  went 
out  upon  the  world  like  the  heroes  of  the  fairy  stories, 
and  drifted  all  over  the  greater  part  of  Europe.  He 
lived  two  years  in  Bordeaux,  ten  in  London,  one  year  in 
Dublin,  one  year  at  the  Hague,  Utrecht,  and  Amster- 
dam, nineteen  in  Paris.  He  acquired  in  the  course  of 
these  varying  habitations  a  large  number  of  languages 
— English,  Italian,  Spanish,  German,  Dutch,  as  well  as 
Greek  and  Latin — and  his  scientific  knowledge  was  ex- 
tensive and  profound.  He  sighed  and  sought  for  liter- 
ary glory.  In  1775  appeared  at  Amsterdam  his  book 
on  "  Man,  and  the  Principles  and  Laws  of  the  Influence 
of  the  Soul  upon  the  Body,  and  the  Body  on  the  Soul." 
An  English  version  had  come  out  two  years  earlier. 


1775-89.  MARAT'S  WRITINGS.  501 

The  book  is  forgotten  now;  we  may  doubt  if  here  and 
there  half  a  dozen  stray  admirers  of  Marat  read  it  in 
the  days  that  pass ;  it  made  no  profound  mark  upon  its 
time.  But  it  was  attacked  by  Voltaire  in  1776,  which 
was  in  itself  a  kind  of  immortality.  Camille  Desmou- 
lins  and  Marat  shall  yet  quarrel  over  the  sneers  from 
Ferney.  Marat  was  not,  however,  the  kind  of  man  to 
be  easily  abashed,  even  by  a  Voltaire.  He  kept  on 
writing  books — books  on  light  and  electricity,  essays 
on  optics  and  translations  of  Newton's  "Optics,"  pam- 
phlets on  the  balloon  catastrophe  of  June,  1785,  which 
caused  the  death  of  the  aeronauts  Pilatre  de  Rosier  and 
Romain.  It  seems  certain  that  he  was  a  sincere  and 
eager  man  of  science,  that  he  earned  a  fairly  distin- 
guished name,  that  he  interested  Franklin,  and  that  he 
was  desperately  in  earnest  about  his  theories.  His  last 
scientific  book,  published  in  1788,  on  "Light  and  Op- 
tics," bore  the  enthusiastic  epigraph,  "  They  will  sur- 
vive in  spite  of  wind  and  wave."  There  lies  before  the 
curious,  too,  a  romance  given  to  the  world  by  the  bib- 
liophile Jacob,  dealing  with  the  "Adventures  of  the 
young  Count  de  Potowski,"  which  is  said  to  be  by 
Marat,  and  which  is  accepted  as  Marat's  by  his  devoted 
biographer,  Alfred  Bougeart.  Veritable  or  not,  it  does 
not  rank  its  author  among  the  great  romancists  of  the 
earth. 

There  was  busy  work  before  the  Gallicized  child  of 
the  Cagliari  doctor.  Good-bye  to  proposals  to  estab- 
lish the  existence  of  a  nervous  fluid  as  the  true  vehicle 
of  union  between  soul  and  body;  good-bye  to  attacks 
upon  Helvetius  ;  good-bye  to  honorary  membership,  for 
"  Chains  of  Slavery"  literature,  of  patriotic  societies  of 
Carlisle,  Berwick,  and  Newcastle;  good-bye  to  that 
illustrious  position  of  brevet-physician  to  the  guards  of 


502  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XXXII. 

the  Count  d'Artois,  which  has  oddly  earned  him,  from 
Carlyle  and  others,  the  grotesque  title  of  a  horse-leech. 
Marat  now  became  the  impassioned  political  pamphlet- 
eer. The  M.D.  of  St.  Andrew's  University,  the  man 
of  science  whose  rejection  by  the  Academy  aroused  an- 
gry indignation  in  Goethe,  the  disciple  in  the  "Plan 
de  Legislation  Criminelle  "  of  Beccaria,  was  to  begin  his 
strange  career  of  fame  and  infamy  as  the  author  of  the 
"Offrande  a  la  Patrie"  in  1788,  and  the  flood  of  little 
pamphlets  which  begot  the  "Ami  du  Peuple"  in  1789. 
As  we  watch  him  here,  on  the  threshold  of  his  new 
career,  we  must  at  least  admit  that  there  never  was  a 
man  in  more  deadly  earnest;  that  there  never  was  a  man, 
in  his  wild  way,  more  upright  or  more  sincere.  It  is 
pleasant  to  read,  it  is  pleasant  to  be  able  to  cordially 
endorse,  the  very  sane  words  of  an  English  writer  in 
the  "  Encyclopaedia  Britannica  : "  "  Whatever  his  polit- 
ical ideas,  two  things  shine  clearly  out  of  the  mass  of 
prejudice  which  has  shrouded  the  name  of  Marat — that 
he  was  a  man  of  great  attainments  and  acknowledged 
position,  who  sacrificed  fortune,  health,  life  itself,  to  his 
convictions ;  and  that  he  was  no  '  bete  feroce?  no  fac- 
tious demagogue,  but  a  man,  and  a  humane  man  too, 
who  could  not  keep  his  head  cool  in  stirring  times,  who 
was  rendered  suspicious  by  constant  persecution,  and 
who  has  been  regarded  as  a  personification  of  murder 
because  he  published  every  thought  in  his  mind,  while 
others  only  vented  their  anger  and  displayed  their  sus- 
picions in  spoken  words."  We  shall  have  much  to  do 
with  Marat :  it  is  very  well  to  keep  these  temperate 
thoughts  and  words  in  mind  during  the  course  of  our 
relations  with  him.  Here,  however,  before  we  grow 
into  too  grim  and  deep  a  knowledge  of  the  man,  we 
may  as  well  put  on  record  the  profound  regret  of  all 


1759-94.  DAXTON.  503 

bibliophiles  that  Marat's  little  "Essay  on  Gleets,"  pub- 
lished in  London  in  1/75  for  the  "ridiculously  small 
sum"  of  eighteenpence,  is  absolutely  unfindable — gone 
like  the  "snows  of  yester-year;"  gone,  perhaps,  to  the 
moon — where,  according  to  Ariosto,  all  things  lost  on 
earth  do  go — but  certainly  gone;  gone  as  if  it  had  never 
been.  That  pamphlet  was  fourteen  years  old  now  in 
the  year  1789,  and  Marat  had  other  and  more  moment- 
ous matters  to  think  of. 

There  was  all  this  time  a  man  at  the  Paris  bar  who 
took  no  part  in  the  opening  of  the  play,  but  who  was 
yet  to  act  a  leading  part  in  the  performance,  Georges 
Jacques  Danton.  The  business  yet  to  be  of  the  Bas- 
tille, which  brought  into  juxtaposition  such  men  as  Ma- 
rat and  Marceau,  Santerre  and  Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere, 
did  not  bring  forward  the  name  of  Danton.  The  Cor- 
deliers' club,  that  centre  and  hotbed  of  all  that  was  most 
extreme  in  the  revolutionary  movement,  had  not  yet 
made  Danton  its  chief  and  illustrious.  But  there  was 
Danton  in  this  Paris  of  1789,  a  man  of  thirty  summers, 
working  away  at  his  profession,  and  watching  every- 
thing that  happened  with  his  keen,  wide  eyes. 

Georges  Jacques  Danton  was  born  at  Arcis-sur-Aube 
on  August  26,  1759.  His  father,  Jacques  Danton,  pro- 
cureur  in  the  bailiwick  of  Arcis-sur-Aube,  died  in  1762, 
when  Georges  Danton  was  three  years  old,  leaving  a 
widow,  who  married  again,  and  who  lived  till  the  Octo- 
ber of  1813.  He  left  also  two  girls  and  a  boy.  Danton 
grew  up  a  strong,  sturdy,  largely  made  country  boy. 
Never  very  comely,  a  series  of  mishaps  left  their  suc- 
cessive marks  upon  his  massive  features.  He  was  tossed 
by  a  bull  in  his  boyhood,  and  one  of  the  horns  of  the 
bull  gave  him  a  hare-lip  for  life.  This  disagi'eeable 
experience,  instead  of  deterring  him  from  frequenting 


504  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 

the  society  of  bulls,  seemed  only  to  have  tarred  him  on 
to  becoming  a  sort  of  amateur  bull- fighter  ;  and  on  a 
second  occasion  he  got  into  an  argument  with  a  bull, 
which  ended  in  his  being  badly  gored  in  the  face,  and 
his  nose  being  flattened  and  nearly  destroyed.  After- 
wards he  got  into  a  quarrel  with  a  savage  boar,  which 
tusked  him  badly.  Later  still  he  caught  the  small-pox, 
and  the  disease  still  further  disfigured  his  countenance. 
But,  in  spite  of  all  these  misfortunes,  there  was  a  com- 
manding quality  and  rugged  charm  about  his  face  which 
generally  commended  it  to  those  with  whom  he  came  in 
contact.  He  was  sent  to  school  at  Troyes,  and  wrhile 
there  in  1775,  hearing  of  the  approaching  consecration 
of  Louis  XVI.,  he  formed  an  unconquerable  desire  to 
see  how  kings  were  made.  He  borrowed  some  money 
from  his  schoolfellows,  ran  away  from  school  by  scaling 
the  wall,  walked  the  whole  twenty-eight  leagues,  and  saw 
the  consecration.  It  did  not  apparently  impress  him  in 
the  least,  and  when  he  came  back  to  school  he  made  very 
merry  over  the  solemn  pomp  of  king-making,  which  he 
had  been  at  such  pains  to  witness.  There  is  hardly  a 
more  interesting  episode  in  history  than  this  of  the  wild 
country  lad  of  sixteen  standing  in  that  cathedral  at 
Rheims,  and  watching  with  ironical  attentiveness  the 
making  of  a  king.  Did  the  scene  come  back  to  him, 
we  may  wonder,  in  later  years,  when  he  was  to  play  so 
prominent  a  part  in  undoing  what  that  ceremony  did  ? 
His  relatives  had  some  idea  of  his  adopting  the  clerical 
calling;  but  the  proposal  did  not  appeal  to  the  young 
Danton.  He  decided  for  the  law,  came  to  Paris,  entered 
a  lawyer's  office  somewhere  about  1779.  He  worked 
hard  at  the  law,  and  tasted  poverty  for  some  years.  In 
1787  he  married  Antoinette  Gabrielle  Charpentier,  the 
pretty  and  well-endowed  daughter  of  M.  Charpentier, 


1762-94.  AtfDRfi  CHtfXIER.  505 

who  kept  the  Cafe  de  1'Ecole  in  the  Palais  Royal.  Such 
was  the  record  of  the  man  who  now,  as  advocate  in 
Paris,  watched  what  was  going  on  and  waited  for  his 
opportunity. 

One  future  actor  in  the  great  play,  one  future  victim 
of  la  Sainte  Guillotine,  followed  eagerly  all  that  is  going 
on,  but  followed  it  sadly,  from  afar,  like  Ovid  in  Pontus. 
A  picturesque  young  poet  was  over  in  England,  in  Lon- 
don, a  secretary  in  the  French  Legation.  He  was  only 
twenty -seven  years  old,  but  already  his  unpublished 
poems  had  made  the  name  of  Andre  Cheni'er  decently 
illustrious  in  circles  of  the  politely  lettered  ;  his  passion 
for  Madame  de  Bonneuil  was  familiar  gossip  to  the  so- 
cially scandalous.  He  was  the  most  Grecian  of  young 
men  :  talked,  thought,  wrote  nothing  but  Sappho,  Greek 
Anthology,  and  Theocritus.  He  was  born,  appropriately 
enough,  in  Constantinople,  for  his  Greek  spirit  was  more 
Byzantine  than  Athenian.  He  was  very  miserable  at 
being  away  from  Paris,  and  longed  to  return.  Patience, 
young  Franco- Anglo-Hellene.  You  will  return  too  soon  : 
there  is  a  day  waiting  you,  a  July  25,  1794,  when  you 
will  ride  with  a  couple  of  counts,  your  fellow  -  poet 
Roucher,  and  that  most  famous  of  adventurers,  Baron 
Trenck,  on  their  and  your  last  adventure.  But  the 
young  man  saw  nothing  of  all  this  through  the  dusty 
London  summer,  as  he  drove  his  diplomatic  pen  and 
dreamed  of  Paris  and  the  blue  Sicilian  sea  and  the 
brown -limbed  shepherds  of  Theocritus.  His  brother 
was  in  Paris,  the  eager,  strenuous  dramatist  and  eager, 
strenuous  republican  politician,  Marie  Joseph.  We  shall 
meet  with  both  again. 

One  other  figure  we  may  perhaps  note.  It  is  that  of 
a  man  of  some  forty-three  years  of  age ;  a  man  with  a 
peaked  face,  a  large,  hard  mouth,  and  large,  hard  eyes. 


506  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXII. 

He  was  a  Picard.  He  had  been  educated  in  Paris,  and 
had  known  what  it  was  to  be  poor.  He  had  been  a  pro- 
cureur  at  the  chatelet,  and  had  sold  his  office.  He  had 
been  a  widower,  and  had  recently  married  again  a  wife 
who  was  devoted  to  him.  He  had  many  children.  He  had 
written  some  enthusiastic  verses  in  praise  of  Louis  XVI. 
His  name  was  Antoine  Quentin  Fouquier-Tinville. 


1*789.  M.  NECKER  SINGS  OUT  OF  TUNE.  60? 


CHAPTER  XXXIII. 

THE     OVERTURE     ENDS. 

NECKER  himself  read  out  the  recapitulation  of  this 
long  discourse,  and  stimulated  a  little  the  flagging  spir- 
its of  a  wearied  assembly.  They  might  well  be  excused 
for  feeling  a  certain  weariness.  The  opening  speech  of 
the  Keeper  of  the  Seals  had  not  been  over-lengthy,  but 
it  had  been  practically  inaudible,  as  M.  de  Barentin's 
voice  was  weak.  The  financial  statement  of  M.  Necker 
was  exceedingly  long.  It  occupies  thirty  closely  printed 
columns  of  the  Hfoniteur,  and  it  depressed  its  audience. 
It  was,  of  course,  could  good  M.  Necker  only  have  known 
it,  so  much  waste  time ;  as  well  might  a  philosopher  at- 
tempt to  stay  the  progress  of  a  conflagration  by  reading 
a  paper  on  the  inflammable  nature  of  tinder.  However, 
useful  or  useless,  the  speech  did  come  to  an  end,  like  all 
things,  French  monarchies  and  French  revolutions  in- 
cluded ;  Necker  made  his  bow,  papers  were  rolled  up, 
the  king  rose  up  and  departed,  with  his  glittering  court 
about  him,  amid  shouts  of  "  Vive  le  roi !"  from  the  as- 
sembly ;  shouts  which  we  may  imagine  to  have  come 
with  greater  volume  of  enthusiasm  from  the  noble  and 
clerical  throats  than  from  the  throats  of  the  Third  Es- 
tate. It  was  half-past  four  of  the  May  day,  and  the 
Versailles  streets  were  still  light,  when  the  great  States- 
General,  for  the  first  time  brought  together,  spread  itself 
abroad  in  all  directions,  chiefly  needing  refreshment. 
Hunger  is  imperative,  even  upon  saviours  of  society, 


608  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIII. 

whether  reactionary  or  revolutionary,  and  we  need 
scarcely  doubt  that  the  most  prominent  thought  in  all 
men's  minds,  after  that  lengthy  speech  of  Necker,  which 
M.  Broussonet,  Perpetual  President  of  the  Society  of 
Agriculture,  prosed  out,  was  dinner.  But  over  all  those 
dinners  that  day,  whether  in  the  stately  palace  or  the 
humblest  lodging  in  which  the  modest  member  of  the 
Third  Estate  found  himself,  in  the  inn  which  sheltered 
the  provincial  priest  of  narrow  purse,  or  in  the  chateau 
where  one  noble  offered  princely  hospitality  to  another, 
nothing  was  talked  about  but  that  day's  work  and  that 
day's  congress.  But  no  one  of  them  all,  not  Mirabeau 
the  Magnificent,  nor  loyal  Cazales,  nor  scheming  Tal- 
leyrand-Perigord,  nor  young  Roman  Barnave,  nor  ob- 
scure, unnoticed  Robespierre,  had  any  dream  of  the 
tragic  character  of  the  drama  to  which  they  had  just 
played  the  overture.  Nor  did  they  dream  of  the  rapid- 
ity with  which  the  ball  was  to  be  set  rolling.  Louis 
XVI.,  going  to  sleep  that  night,  would  have  scarcely 
slept,  or  wo.uld  have  dreamed  bad  dreams,  if  he  could 
have  guessed  that  little  royal  document,  to  be  made 
public  on  the  morrow,  accompanied  by  a  little  dexter- 
ous royal  manipulation  of  the  great  triune  puzzle  of  the 
States  -  General,  would  be  the  first  little  insignificant 
move  which  should  end  for  him  and  so  many  of  his  in 
the  Place  de  la  Greve.  If  we  were  superstitious,  we 
should  like  to  imagine  the  ghosts  of  the  great  kings  of 
the  House  of  Capet  crowding  into  the  royal  room  that 
night,  gazing  in  mute  despair  upon  their  most  luckless 
descendant  and  vanishing,  ominous,  into  air.  But  Louis, 
who  recorded  many  things  in  his  strange  diary,  has  not, 
disappointingly,  recorded  the  dreams  that  visited  his 
tired  brain  that  night. 

Necker's  speech  was,  naturally  enough,  not  regarded 


1789.  OPENING  OF  THE  STATES-GENERAL.  509 

with  universal  favor.  It  seemed  curiously  unworthy  of 
the  great  occasion  in  the  eyes  of  the  democratic  leaders. 
Here  was  an  historical  assembly  called  together  from  all 
the  ends  of  France,  and  Necker  could  find  nothing  more 
momentous  to  offer  it  than  a  dreary  discussion  upon  the 
finances.  The  finance  question  was  important,  but  not 
the  most  important,  to  men  who  were  eager  to  reform 
the  Constitution,  to  men  who  carried  their  new  zeal  so 
far  that  they  thought  Louis  XVI.  should  have,  as  it 
were,  consecrated  the  occasion  by  resigning  his  royal 
authority,  and  receiving  it  again  as  the  free  gift  of  a 
free  people. 

The  chief  immediate  effect  of  the  great  opening  of 
the  States-General  was  to  spread  abroad  a  profound 
sense  of  disquiet.  Punctilious  deputies,  irritated  by 
the  petty  humiliations  inflicted  on  the  Third  Estate  by 
De  Breze  and  his  kind,  suspected  that  these  slights  were 
but  the  marks  of  graver  purposes.  Undoubtedly  there 
was  much  to  justify  suspicion  of  sinister  intentions  on 
the  part  of  the  court.  There  were  mysterious  move- 
ments and  massing  of  troops.  A  battalion  of  Swiss  and 
two  new  regiments,  the  Royal-Cravate  and  the  Burgun- 
dian  Cavalry,  had  just  entered  Paris,  and  rumors  came 
thickly  of  fresh  troops  marching  on  the  capital.  Was 
not  all  this  a  covert,  but  distinct,  menace  to  democratic 
Paris?  was  not  the  court  preparing  to  manipulate  a 
troublesome  Third  Estate  by  the  strong  hand  ? 


510  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.          Cu.  XXXI V. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV. 

THE    EIGHT    WEEKS. 

ON  the  very  day  after  the  opening  of  the  States- 
General  the  strain  was  felt  and  the  struggle  began. 
By  posted  placard,  by  heraldic  proclamation,  the  king 
had  made  it  known  to  his  three  orders  that  they  were 
to  assemble  again  at  nine  of  the  clock  on  the  morning 
of  May  6.  At  the  appointed  hour,  therefore,  the  depu- 
ties of  the  Third  Estate  presented  themselves  duly  at 
the  Great  Hall,  only  to  find  that  they  had  the  hall  all 
to  themselves.  The  place  looked  a  little  lugubrious,  a 
little  vacant  and  desolate.  There  was  not  the  brilliant 
crowd  of  yesterday  ;  there  was  not  the  courtly  color 
and  glitter.  The  six  hundred  deputies  of  the  Third 
Estate  did  not  seem  a  great  body  in  the  vast  hall  ; 
their  uniform  attire,  which  aroused  the  wrath  of  Mira- 
beau,  showed  sombrely,  almost  funereally.  The  two 
other  orders  had  not  arrived,  did  not  arrive  :  it  was 
soon  obvious  that  they  were  not  going  to  arrive.  It 
presently  came  to  the  knowledge  of  the  expectant 
Third  Estate,  naturally  suspicious  and  wisely  watchful, 
that  the  two  other  orders  were  at  that  present  moment 
abiding  in  special  halls  of  their  own,  and  busily  engaged 
in  verifying  their  powers  by  themselves.  The  deputies 
of  the  Third  Estate  were  ready  at  once  to  proclaim 
their  opposition  to  any  such  process.  To  them,  or  at 
least  to  the  wisest  among  them,  it  seemed  vital  that  the 
States-General  should  be  regarded  as  a  composite  body; 


1789.  WHAT   IS  TO   BE   DONE?  511 

that  if  separate  verification  of  powers  were  admitted, 
the  separate  vote  by  orders  might  come  to  be  admitted 
too,  and  the  most  important  privilege  for  which  they 
had  struggled  be  thus  whistled  down  the  wind.  It 
must  have  been  a  curious  sight,  that  great  hall  with  its 
six  hundred  sober  -  habited  deputies,  excited,  angry, 
courageous,  determined  not  to  concede  any  of  the 
points  for  which  the  will  of  the  people  had  called  them 
into  existence,  yet  anxious  too,  naturally  enough,  not 
to  proceed  too  fast,  not  to  be  premature,  not  to  be  rash 
nor  impolitic. 

After  waiting  for  some  time  without  any  sign  of  the 
advent  of  either  the  nobility  or  the  clergy,  it  became 
obvious  that  the  assembled  deputies  ought  to  do  some- 
thing. The  only  question  was,  What  was  best  to  do  ? 
The  first  thing  and  the  simplest  seemed  to  be  to  intro- 
duce some  element  of  order  into  their  excited,  murmur- 
ous ranks.  The  oldest  deputy  present,  the  father,  as  we 
may  say,  of  the  Third  Estate,  M.  Leroux,  whilom  mayor 
of  the  bailiwick  of  Amiens,  was  called  upon  by  some 
process  of  popular  acclaim  to  maintain  order  among  his 
children.  They  were  not  yet,  with  their  unverified 
powers,  a  properly  constituted  body ;  but,  like  all  hu- 
man societies,  they  could,  of  their  own  will,  establish  a 
sort  of  social  comity  among  themselves.  This  social 
comity  M.  Leroux  was  to  preserve,  aided  in  his  efforts 
by  the  six  oldest  deputies  next  in  age  to  himself.  So 
much  having  been  resolved  upon,  the  next  matter  in 
hand  was  to  decide  upon  what  step  the  semi-coherent 
Third  Estate  should  now  take. 

The  first  recorded  speech  that  rises  clearly  out  of 
the  unexpected  chaos  is  that  of  Malouet.  Malouet's 
proposition  was  to  send  a  deputation  from  the  Third 
Estate  to  the  two  other  orders,  inviting  them  to  join 


512  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIV. 

their  colleagues  in  the  common  hall.  Mounier  argued 
the  point.  He  was  more  prudent,  more  deliberate  ; 
he  thought  nothing  was  lost  by  sitting  still.  It  may  be, 
he  suggested,  that  the  other  orders  are  at  the  very  mo- 
ment deliberating  upon  some  such  proposition;  it  would 
be,  therefore,  better  to  wait  and  let  the  other  orders 
speak.  A  great  deal  of  discussion  followed,  which  we 
should  like  to  hear — every  word  of  that  first  fluctuant 
democratic  assembly  would  be  curiously  interesting — 
but  which  is  lost  forever  to  human  ears.  In  the  end  it 
was  decided  that  for  the  time  being  the  best  possible 
action  was  inaction  :  the  Third  Estate  resolved  to  sit 
still  and  do  nothing.  With  a  quaint  formal  logic  they 
argued  that,  as  their  powers  were  not  then  verified, 
they  were  still  only  a  mere  aggregation  of  individuals 
come  together  to  form  the  States-General,  but  as  yet 
unformed.  They  could — they  admitted  this  much — 
discuss  things  amicably  among  themselves,  but  in  them- 
selves they  recognized  no  power  whatever  to  act — to, 
as  a  body,  do  anything  whatever.  Characteristically 
they  pushed  their  logic  so  fine  that  they  refused  even 
to  open  any  of  the  many  letters  addressed  to  the  Third 
Estate.  As  they  could,  however,  discuss  "  amicably," 
they  discussed  the  other  orders,  and  agreed  that  these 
should  have  time  to  reflect  upon  the  unwisdom  of  the 
course  they  were  pursuing.  In  the  midst  of  all  this,  at 
about  half-past  two,  a  deputy  from  Dauphine  —  he  re- 
mains nameless,  a  mystery — came  in  with  the  news  that 
the  two  other  orders  had  resolved  upon  the  separate 
verification  of  their  powers.  Thereupon  the  sitting, 
such  as  it  was — for  in  the  eyes  of  logical  democracy  an 
unorganized  body  could  hardly  even  sit — came  to  an 
end,  and  its  units  parted,  perplexed  but  patient,  to  meet 
a<rain  on  the  morrow  at  nine  of  the  clock. 


1789.  THE   GREAT   RENUNCIATION.  513 

Meanwhile  the  clergy  and  the  nobility  had  in  their 
own  insane  way  been  pretty  busy.  The  clergy,  with 
the  Cardinal  de  la  Rochefoucauld  for  provisional  presi- 
dent, had  decided,  after  a  brisk  debate,  that  their  pow- 
ers should  be  verified  within  the  order.  One  hundred 
and  thirty-three  votes  wrere  given  for  this  decision  as 
against  one  hundred  and  fourteen  opposed  ;  not  much 
of  a  majority,  after  all.  The  majority  was  greater  among 
the  nobles,  where  the  debate  was  even  keener.  Under 
the  provisional  presidentship  of  M.  de  Montboissier,  the 
oldest  noble  present,  the  question  whether  the  verifica- 
tion should  be  special  or  general  was  fought  out.  The 
advocates  of  special  verification  argued  that  the  depu- 
ties elected  in  the  noble  order  should  submit  their  pow- 
ers to  commissioners  chosen  from  that  order.  They 
held  that  the  nobility  could  not  recognize  the  legiti- 
macy of  the  powers  of  the  members  of  the  other  orders, 
and  could  not,  therefore,  submit  their  own  powers  to 
them  ;  that  the  order  of  nobility  was  alone  qualified  to 
investigate  the  titles  by  which  their  deputies  claimed 
to  be  included  ;  and,  finally,  that  it  really  was  not  worth 
while  to  waste  time  about  the  matter,  as  the  main  thing 
was  to  get  verified  somehow,  and  so  proceed  to  busi- 
ness. This  last  argument  was  sufficiently  specious,  but 
it  did  not  delude  the  democratically  minded  nobility. 
Lafayette,  the  Duke  de  Liancourt,  the  Vicompte  de 
Castellane,  gallant  Count  Crillon  from  Beauvais,  the 
deputies  of  Dauphine,  of  Aix  in  Provence,  of  Amont, 
and  some  others,  to  the  number  all  told  of  forty-seven 
deputies,  argued  that  it  was  the  right  of  the  States- 
General,  as  composed  of  all  three  orders,  to  verify  the 
powers  through  commissioners  of  the  three  orders,  see- 
ing that  the  elections  had  been  sanctioned  by  the  three 
orders  of  each  district,  and  that  the  deputies  had  taken 
I.— 33 


514  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXI V. 

the  oath  in  presence  of  the  three  orders.  But  their 
arguments  were  thrown  away  ;  the  democratic  forty- 
seven  were  out-voted  by  one  hundred  and  eighty-eight 
nobles,  blindly  anxious  to  invite  collision  and  accelerate 
catastrophe.  In  accordance  with  the  decision  of  the 
majority,  twelve  of  the  oldest  nobles  were  nominated 
as  commissioners  to  verify  the  powers  of  the  order. 
Thereafter,  as  M.  Freteau  urged  that  no  deliberation 
should  take  place  until  the  election  of  the  deputies  of 
Paris,  the  nobles  raised  their  sitting  and  adjourned  to 
the  following  Monday,  under  the  impression,  as  far  as 
the  triumphant  majority  were  concerned,  that  they  had 
done  an  exceedingly  good  day's  work.  Of  that  fact, 
Lafayette  and  the  rest  of  the  protesting  forty-seven 
were,  we  may  well  imagine,  less  serenely  assured. 

On  the  following  day,  Thursday,  May  7,  Malouet  re- 
peated his  proposition  of  the  previous  sitting.  He 
thought  that  they  ought  to  allow  nothing  to  delay  the 
main  purpose  for  which  they  were  called  together. 
They  might  have  to  reproach  themselves  bitterly  if  any 
disaster  followed  upon  their  inaction.  In  any  case,  no 
harm  could  come  of  his  proposal.  The  mere  invitation 
to  the  two  other  orders  to  come  and  join  them  could 
not  possibly,  as  some  seemed  to  fear,  constitute  them 
into  an  organized  body.  It  would  only  show  their  ea- 
gerness to  begin  work,  and  would  throw  the  blame  of 
delay  upon  the  clergy  and  the  nobility.  Then,  for  the 
first  time  that  we  have  any  knowledge  of,  the  lion  voice 
of  Mirabeau  was  lifted  in  the  debate.  Mirabeau  was 
altogether  opposed  to  Malouet's  suggestion.  He  held 
that  the  Third  Estate  should  persist  in  its  policy  of  mas- 
terly inactivity.  It  did  not  exist  as  an  organized  order, 
and  had  not,  therefore,  the  right  to  send  any  deputa- 
tion. His  words,  we  may  imagine,  were  fierce,  vehe- 


1789.  IN   A    CASUAL    WAY.  515 

merit,  eager  ;  it  is  tantalizing  to  have  them  only  pre- 
served in  the  dry  and  dusty  brevity  of  the  Moniteur. 
Mounier  endeavored  to  steer  a  medium  course  between 
the  anxiety  of  Malouet  and  the  indignation  of  Mirabeau. 
He  was  as  opposed  as  the  latter  to  any  formal  deputa- 
tion ;  he  was  as  unwilling  as  the  former  to  risk  any 
danger  by  unnecessary  delay.  His  advice,  therefore, 
was  at  least  ingenious.  The  Third  Estate,  not  being 
organized,  could  not  formally  address  itself  to  either  of 
the  two  other  orders.  But — and  here  the  ingenious 
Mounier  revealed  his  tact — there  was  nothing  whatever 
to  prevent  individual  deputies  of  the  Third  Estate  from 
lounging,  in  a  casual  way,  into  the  rooms  where  the 
other  orders  were  assembled,  and  suggesting,  still  in 
a  casual  way,  that  it  would  be  on  the  whole  rather  a 
good  thing  if  the  two  orders  were  to  join  themselves 
to  the  third  order,  as  the  king  had  ordered.  These 
casual  deputies  might  further  intimate,  still  in  that 
ingenious  casual  way  which  committed  them  to  noth- 
ing, that  the  deputies  of  the  Third  Estate  would  do 
nothing,  and  intended  to  do  nothing,  until  the  two  other 
orders  joined  them.  Mourner's  plan  took  the  fancy  of 
his  hearers  and  was  adopted  by  an  immense  majority. 
Twelve  members  were  chosen — how,  we  are  not  in- 
formed— and  these  twelve  went,  in  their  casual  way, 
to  have  a  look  in  upon  the  clergy  and  the  nobility. 
Presently  the  twelve  deputies  came  back  again  with 
the  results  of  their  casual  embassy.  They  had  found 
the  room  of  the  nobility  deserted,  except  for  its  twelve 
commissioners  of  verification,  who  informed  their  visit- 
ors that  the  nobles  would  not  meet  again  till  the  Mon- 
day. The  clergy  they  had  found  in  full  session,  and 
the  clergy  had  replied  that  they  would  think  over  the 
proposition  made  by  the  Third  Estate.  There  was 


516  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIV. 

nothing  for  the  Third  Estate  to  do  now  but  to  wait  a 
bit.  Wait  they  accordingly  did,  and  in  about  an  hour 
the  Bishops  of  Montpellier  and  of  Orange,  with  four 
other  ecclesiastics,  came  into  the  hall,  where  we  may 
assume  that  their  entry  created  no  small  sensation. 

The  clerical  deputation  had  not  much  to  suggest,  how- 
ever. All  that  they  had  to  offer  was  the  proposal  that 
each  of  the  three  orders  should  nominate  commissioners 
who  might  deliberate  together  as  to  whether  the  powers 
of  the  three  orders  should  be  verified  in  common  or  not. 
Having  discharged  themselves  of  their  mission,  the  bish- 
ops and  their  four  followers  withdrew.  A  confused, 
vehement  debate  sprang  up  on  the  proposal.  The  de- 
bate came  to  nothing.  The  matter  was  too  important 
for  hasty,  ill-judged  decision,  and  the  sitting  came  to 
an  end,  as  it  had  begun,  in  doubt,  but  also  in  determina- 
tion not  to  give  in. 

That  same  May  7  was  an  eventful  day  for  other  rea- 
sons. It  saw  a  deadly  blow  struck — and  parried — at 
the  liberty  of  the  press.  On  the  previous  day  the 
king's  Council  of  State  had  issued  an  order  calling  at- 
tention to  the  issue  of  periodicals  which  had  not  re- 
ceived the  usual  legal  permission,  and  declaring  that  the 
existing  law  would  be  enforced  against  the  publishers 
of  all  such  periodicals.  The  next  day  made  plain  the 
meaning  of  this  rescript.  Another  order  of  the  Council 
of  State  appeared,  formally  suppressing  the  periodical 
entitled  "  iStats  Generaux,"  of  which  the  first  number, 
dated  from  Versailles,  May  2,  had  already  appeared. 
The  king,  according  to  this  precious  Order  of  Council, 
had  felt  himself  bound  to  mark  particularly  his  disap- 
proval of  a  work  as  condemnable  in  its  nature  as  it  was 
reprehensible  in  its  form.  His  majesty,  therefore,  dis- 
covering that  this  print  was  "injurious,  and  bearing, 


1789.  SUPPRESSION  AND  RESISTANCE.  517 

under  the  appearance  of  liberty,  all  the  characteristics 
of  license,"  ordered  its  immediate  and  comprehensive 
suppression.  It  was  typical  of  the  unlucky  court  and 
the  unlucky  king  that  such  a  time  should  have  been 
chosen  to  play  so  desperate  a  game,  and  that  the  selected 
victim  should  have  been  a  Mirabeau — should  have  been 
the  Mirabeau.  Mirabeau  was  the  author  of  the  "  ]&tats 
Generaux;"  Mirabeau  was  not  the  kind  of  man  to  be 
daunted  by  the  royal  fulmination.  His  letter  to  his 
constituents  concerning  this  edict  is  a  masterpiece  of 
eloquent  indignation.  "  It  is  true,  then,"  he  says,  "  that, 
instead  of  enfranchising  the  nation,  they  seek  only  to 
rivet  its  chains;  it  is  in  the  face  of  the  assembled  na- 
tions that  they  dare  to  produce  these  Aulic  decrees." 
But  Mirabeau  was  not  to  be  dismayed,  not  to  be  in- 
timidated. He  was  careful  to  exonerate  the  king  from 
complicity  in  the  ill-advised  decrees.  It  was  not  the 
monarch  who  was  culpable,  but  his  audacious  ministers 
who  had  presumed  to  affix  the  royal  seal  to  their  crimi- 
nal edicts,  and  who,  while  they  tolerated  and  fostered 
the  lying  prints  of  the  Court  party,  sought  to  destroy 
with  an  antique  prerogative  the  right  of  the  deputies  of 
the  nation  to  make  known  to  their  constituents  the  do- 
ings of  the  States-General.  Mirabeau  announced,  as  it 
might  have  been  expected  that  he  would  announce,  that 
he  intended  to  continue  the  condemned  publication,  and 
continue  it  he  did  under  the  title  of  "Lettres  a  mes 
Commettants."  So  much  the  court  gained  by  their 
move.  Nay,  they  gained  more  than  this,  and  worse  for 
them. 

The  assembly  of  the  electors  of  Paris  was  still  sitting, 
working  at  its  cahiers,  when  the  news  of  the  royal  edict 
reached  them  on  this  very  May  7,  while  the  clergy  and 
the  Commons  were  exchanging  ideas.  The  Elective 


518  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIV. 

Assembly  immediately  interrupted  its  task  to  formulate 
a  solemn  protest  against  the  decree  of  the  Council.  For 
the  first  time  Paris  interfered  in  public  affairs,  and  it 
made  a  good  beginning.  From  that  moment  the  free- 
dom of  the  press  was  assured  in  France.  The  Court 
party  in  their  desperate  game  had  made  a  rash  move, 
and  lost  heavily  at  a  moment  when  they  could  not  even 
afford  to  lose  lightly.  The  mad  attempt  to  conceal  from 
the  nation  at  large  what  was  going  on  in  the  States- 
General  that  represented  it,  or  only  to  let  it  know  as 
much  as  it  seemed  good  to  the  Court  party  to  allow  to 
filter  through  the  courtly  prints,  was  completely  check- 
mated. From  that  hour  the  whole  population  of  France 
was  almost  as  much  in  touch  with  the  States-General,  or 
rather  with  the  Third  Estate,  as  Paris  was  itself.  For 
Paris,  for  the  people,  lived  now  in  close  and  daily  com- 
munion with  the  Third  Estate.  Into  the  great  Salle  des 
Menus,  where  the  Third  Estate  daily  collected  together, 
the  populace  poured  daily,  first  come  first  served,  to 
listen  to  what  the  Third  Estate  said,  to  witness  what 
the  Third  Estate  did.  Paris  was  in  feverish,  electric 
communication  with  Versailles  through  the  endless  pro- 
cession of  comers  and  goers  who,  as  it  were,  linked  the 
two  centres  together. 

Every  day  more  and  more  the  course  of  events  was 
dividing  the  State  into  two  parties,  the  party  which  was 
represented  by  the  Third  Estate,  and  the  party  which 
was  represented  by  the  king,  or  rather  by  the  court. 
The  differences  which  divided  the  court  itself  were 
being  obliterated  in  the  face  of  what  the  court  regarded 
as  the  common  danger  represented  by  the  attitude  of 
the  Third  Estate.  The  court  had  for  its  prop  the  sup- 
port of  the  majority  at  least  of  the  two  privileged  or- 
ders. It  had  also,  or  thought  that  it  had,  the  support 


1789.  DEATH   OF  M.  IIJfiLIAUD. 


519 


of  the  troops  it  was  massing  around  Paris  and  Ver- 
sailles. The  Third  Estate,  knowing  itself  also  to  be 
menaced  by  this  massing  of  troops,  had  on  its  side  only 
the  popular  press  and  the  voice  of  public  opinion.  But 
every  day  as  it  went  by  gave  the  members  of  the  Third 
Estate  clearer  assurance  that  the  people  were  with  them. 
They  were  shown  so  much  by  the  daily  crowds  who 
thronged  from  Paris  to  witness  their  debates.  They 
were  shown  so  much  by  eager,  excited  Paris,  holding  its 
own  kind  of  irregular  National  Assembly  in  the  gardens 
of  the  Palais  Royal.  There  day  after  day  the  crowd 
grew  greater,  and  the  news  from  Versailles  was  more 
eagerly  sought,  more  and  more  excitedly  canvassed. 
They  knew  so  much  in  the  action  of  the  Elective  As- 
sembly of  Paris,  which  swelled  their  number  with  demo- 
cratic deputies,  and  which  so  boldly  fought  for  them  the 
battle  of  the  freedom  of  the  press. 

On  Friday,  May  8,  the  Nobles  did  not  meet  at  all. 
The  clergy  met  to  'do  little  or  nothing.  The  Third 
Estate  assembled  to  discuss  some  system  of  police,  some 
organization  for  its  anomalous  position.  The  debate 
was  interrupted  by  the  arrival  of  the  Bishop  of  Mans 
and  four  cures  of  his  diocese  with  the  news  of  the  death 
of  M.  Heliaud,  deputy  of  the  Commons  of  that  province, 
and  with  the  request  that  the  Third  Estate  would  assist 
at  the  interment  that  night.  He  had  got  "out  of  the 
scrape  of  living,"  perhaps  a  little  too  soon.  The  next 
day,  Saturday,  May  9,  the  Third  Estate,  continuing  its 
debate  of  the  previous  day,  resolved  for  the  present  to 
adopt  no  elaborate  regulations,  but  to  leave  the  order  of 
the  assembly  provisionally  in  the  hands  of  their  dean. 
The  clergy  busied  themselves  with  the  nominations  of 
its  commissioners  and  the  composition  of  the  mooted 
conciliatory  deputation.  The  nobles  did  not  meet  at 


520  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXI?. 

all.  Sunday  intervened,  a  Sunday  that  must  have  been 
tremulous  with  excitement,  and  on  the  Monday  the  ex- 
traordinary game  began  again.  To  the  eyes  of  all 
France,  of  all  the  world,  was  presented  the  astonishing 
spectacle  of  a  States-General  which  could  not  or  would 
not  take  shape,  of  a  Third  Estate  which  sat  with  folded 
arms  and  did  nothing,  of  two  privileged  orders  doing 
worse  than  nothing.  Through  the  long  succession  of 
May  days  from  the  llth  to  the  24th,  nothing  was  done, 
nothing  that  can  be  called  anything. 

The  Commons  still  adhered  to  their  determination  to 
regard  themselves  merely  as  an  assembly  of  citizens 
called  together  by  legitimate  authority  to  wait  for  oth- 
er citizens.  Malouet  and  Mounier  made  occasional  sug- 
gestions of  various  kinds  with  reference  to  some  further 
possible  action  or  decree  of  organization,  suggestions 
which  were  generally  rejected.  The  clergy  and  the  no- 
bility occupied  themselves  with  deputing  representatives 
to  attend  the  service  held  for  the  late  King  Louis  XV., 
a  deed  sufficiently  characteristic.  It  seems  cynically  fit 
that  while  the  world  was  fermenting  with  new  ideas  the 
two  privileged  orders  should  be  busying  themselves 
with  the  memory  of  the  monarch  who,  in  his  own  person, 
may  be  said  to  have  incarnated  the  Old  Order,  with  all 
its  vices,  and  whose  cynical  indifference  to  what  might 
come  after  him  had  been  in  so  great  a  degree  the  cause 
of  what  had  come  to  pass  and  what  was  yet  to  come  to 
pass.  On  Wednesday,  May  13,  a  deputation  from  the 
nobility,  headed  by  the  Duke  de  Praslin,  entered  the 
hall  where  the  Third  Estate  assembled,  announced  that 
they  had  duly  organized  themselves,  and  expressed  their 
willingness  to  meet,  through  a  commission  of  their  own 
order,  with  any  commission  appointed  by  the  Third  Es- 
tate to  confer  with  them  upon  the  matter.  This  sug- 


1789.  D'ARTOlS  THE  HEROIC.  521 

gcstion  was  promptly  backed  up  by  a  similar  proposal 
from  the  clergy  through  a  deputation  headed  by  Gobel, 
Bishop  of  Lydda.  Rabaut-Saint-3£tienne,  who  had  not 
learned  intolerance  from  the  old  lessons  of  the  Cevennes, 
advised  the  Third  Estate  to  hold  the  proposed  confer- 
ence with  the  two  privileged  orders.  On  the  other  side, 
Chapelier,  urged  thereto  by  his  fiery  Breton  blood,  pro- 
posed a  kind  of  angry  protest  against  the  action  of  the 
clergy  and  the  nobility.  The  debate  lasted  over  the 
next  day  and  many  days;  was  not  ended  until  Monday, 
May  18,  when  the  proposition  of  Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, 
slightly  modified,  was  accepted,  and  it  was  agreed  to 
nominate  a  commission  from  the  Third  Estate  to  confer 
with  the  two  other  orders.  On  the  next  day,  Tuesday, 
May  19,  the  commission  was  appointed.  It  consisted 
of  sixteen  members  —  namely,  Rabaut  -  Saint  -  Etienne, 
Target,  Chapelier  of  the  hot  Breton  blood,  Mounier  the 
fertile  of  suggestions,  D'Ailly,  Thouret,  Dupont,  Le- 
grand,  De  Volney,  Red  on,  Viguier,  Garat  1'Aine,  Ber- 
gasse,  Solomon,  Milscent,  and,  best  of  all,  Barnave. 
While  all  this  was  going  on,  the  nobility  had  been  busy- 
ing itself  chiefly  with  the  election  of  the  Count  d'Artois. 
The  Count  d'Artois  had  been  elected  for  Tartas,  and 
had  declined  the  election,  in  obedience  to  the  orders  of 
the  king.  The  nobility  sent  a  formal  expression  of  its 
regret  to  the  Count  d'Artois,  and  the  count  responded 
in  a  high-flown  epistle  in  which  he  acknowledged  with 
gratitude  the  courtesy  of  the  chamber  of  nobility,  and 
talked  of  the  blood  of  his  ancestors,  and  assured  the 
nobility  solemnly  that,  so  long  as  a  drop  of  that  blood 
rested  in  his  veins,  he  would  prove  to  the  world  at  large 
that  he  was  worthy  of  the  privilege  of  being  born  a 
French  nobleman.  No  premature  prophetic  inkling  of 
shameful  flight  marred  the  effect  of  this  rhetoric. 


522  THE   FRENCH    REVOLUTION.         CH.  XXXIV. 

While  the  Commission  of  Conciliation,  most  ironically 
misnamed,  was  meeting,  one  or  two  things  occurred  in 
the  hall  of  the  Third  Estate  which  deserve  to  be  re- 
corded, especially  as  both  of  them  served  to  bring 
Mirabeau  conspicuously  forward.  On  Saturday,  May 
23,  Target's  demand  for  a  record  of  their  proceedings 
was  rejected,  and  with  it  the  petition  of  Panckoucke  to 
be  allowed  to  print  the  proceedings  as  supplement  to 
the  Mercure  de  France.  Then  the  letter  was  read  to 
the  Assembly  from  court -usher  De  Breze.  De  Breze 
wished  to  inform  the  Third  Estate  that  the  king,  willing 
to  accord  the  honor  of  reception  to  such  deputies  as 
had  not  come  to  Versailles  on  the  2d,  would  receive 
them  on  the  following  day,  Sunday,  in  the  Hall  of  Her- 
cules at  six  in  the  evening.  When  the  letter  was  read 
to  its  conclusion,  which  expressed  a  "  sincere  attach- 
ment," Mirabeau  called  out,  "  To  whom  is  this  '  sincere 
attachment '  addressed  ?"  The  reader  of  the  letter  an- 
swered that  it  was  addressed  to  the  dean  of  the  Third 
Estate.  Mirabeau  answered  that  there  was  no  one  in 
the  kingdom  who  was  entitled  to  write  so  to  the  dean 
of  the  Commons,  and  the  Commons,  approving  of  Mira- 
beau's  words,  instructed  that  same  dean  to  let  court- 
usher  De  Breze  know  their  mind  in  this  matter.  The 
other  event  belongs  to  the  sitting  of  Monday,  May  25. 
On  that  day  the  dean  read  out  a  motion  which  had  been 
submitted  to  him.  This  proposed  that  the  deputies 
should  only  attend  in  black  clothes,  or,  at  least,  should 
only  speak  in  black  clothes ;  that  strangers  should  only 
be  allowed  to  sit  upon  the  elevated  grades  at  the  two 
sides  of  the  hall,  while  the  deputies  occupied  the  middle; 
that  the  benches  should  be  numbered  and  drawn  for  by 
lot,  and  the  deans  changed  every  eight  days ;  that  the 
benches  of  the  clergy  and  nobility  should  be  always  left 


1789.  "COUNT"  MltlABEAU. 


523 


empty.  The  quaintest  debate  arose  on  these  proposi- 
tions. Some  members  thought  the  whole  motion  ridic- 
ulous at  a  time  of  such  gravity.  Others,  profoundly 
philosophic,  approved  of  the  black  clothes  rule  as  a  sig- 
nificant lesson  to  the  ridiculous  vanity  of  the  rich.  Mira- 
beau  declared  that  the  whole  thing  proved  the  imme- 
diate necessity  of  some  sort  of  regulations  in  order  to 
keep  their  debates  in  becoming  order.  To  this  Mounier 
retorted  that  when  he  proposed  the  same  thing  a  fort- 
night earlier  Mirabeau  had  opposed  it,  and  caused  its 
rejection.  As  Mounier,  in  speaking,  made  considerable 
use  of  the  expression  "  Count  Mirabeau,"  an  indignant 
deputy,  whose  democratic  name  is  lost  in  oblivion,  pro- 
tested against  the  incessant  repetition  of  ranks  and  dig- 
nities in  an  assembly  of  equal  men.  Mirabeau  replied 
that  he  mocked  himself  of  his  title  of  count ;  that  any 
one  might  take  it  and  wear  it  who  liked;  that  the  only 
title  he  cared  for  was  that  of  the  representative  of  a 
great  province,  and  of  a  great  number  of  his  fellow-cit- 
izens. To  this  the  democratic  deputy  replied  that  he 
cordially  agreed  with  "  Count  Mirabeau,"  and  added 
that  he  called  him  count  in  order  to  show  how  little 
importance  he  attached  to  such  a  title,  which  he  was 
ready  to  give  gratis  to  any  one  who  liked  to  wear  it. 
After  this  odd  little  discussion,  in  which  the  first  note 
of  the  later  war  against  titles  of  all  kinds  was  thus 
sounded,  Mirabeau's  proposition  for  the  better  regula- 
tion of  debates  was  carried  by  a  large  majority. 

On  May  23,  and  also  on  May  25,  the  Commission  of 
Conciliation  met  and  did  not  conciliate.  The  nobility 
and  the  clergy  stuck  to  their  guns.  They  would  have 
the  special  verification  by  each  order  of  its  own  powers. 
They  would  not  hear  of  a  verification  in  common.  The 
Third  Estate,  on  their  side,  would  not  yield.  A  sug- 


524  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIV. 

gested  compromise,  by  which  the  orders  should  be  ver- 
ified by  commissioners  of  the  three  orders,  was  emphat- 
ically rejected  by  the  nobles,  who  acted  all  through  the 
negotiations  with  a  haughty  intolerance  that  did  not 
characterize  the  clergy.  The  clergy,  much  more  divided 
among  themselves,  far  more  deeply  imbued  with  the 
democratic  spirit,  had  not  acted  with  the  impetuosity 
of  the  nobility.  They  did  not,  as  the  nobility  did,  com- 
plete their  verification  after  the  Commission  of  Concil- 
iation was  resolved  upon.  On  the  contrary,  they  sus- 
pended their  verification,  and  declared  themselves  not 
constituted  until  the  result  of  the  commission  should 
be  made  known.  So  things  stood  on  Wednesday,  May 
27,  when  the  Commons  assembled  in  their  hall  and 
listened  to  the  reading  of  the  final  decision  of  the  no- 
bility, in  which  they  insisted  upon  adhering  to  the  sep- 
arate verification,  leaving  it  to  the  States-General  to 
decide  what  rule  should  govern  the  verification  of  the 
powers  of  future  States-General. 

On  this  provocation  Mirabeau  asserted  himself  more 
strongly  than  he  had  yet  done.  Camusat  de  Belombre 
proposed  to  send  a  deputation  to  the  clergy,  calling 
upon  them  to  join  themselves  to  the  Commons.  This 
proposition  Mirabeau  supported  with  all  the  strength 
of  his  eloquence,  with  all  the  influence  of  his  domi- 
nating personality.  Even  we  of  to-day,  who  read  the 
speech  over  in  the  chill  livery  of  black  and  white,  seem, 
as  we  read,  to  hear  what  Carlyle  has  so  happily  called 
"  the  brool  "  of  that  lion  voice,  seem  to  see  the  splendid 
figure  dominate  that  confused,  unorganized  assembly, 
the  marred,  magnificent  face  glow  with  its  patriotic 
passion.  It  would  be  rarely  curious  to  know  the  exact 
impression  which  such  a  speech,  so  delivered,  made  upon 
such  hearers  as  sensible  Mounier  and  sensible  Malouet, 


1789.  MIRABEAU'S  APPEAL. 


525 


who  always  remind  us  of  the  strong  Gyas  and  the 
strong  Cloanthes  in  the  Virgilian  epic  ;  upon  pallid, 
portentous  Robespierre  ;  upon  a  hot-hearted  Barnave  ; 
upon  many  others.  The  individual  effect  we  can  never 
know  ;  the  general  effect  was  electric.  In  scornful, 
scathing  words  he  assailed  an  insolent  nobility.  He 
held  up  to  derision  their  preposterous  claims  to  recog- 
nition as  a  "legislative  and  sovereign  chamber."  In 
words  of  mingled  conciliation  and  menace  he  reviewed 
the  vacillating  conduct  of  the  clergy.  "  Let  us,"  he  said, 
"  send  a  most  solemn  and  a  most  numerous  deputation 
to  call  upon  the  clergy  in  the  name  of  the  God  of 
Peace  to  rally  to  the  side  of  reason,  justice,  truth,  and 
join  the  Commons  in  a  last  appeal  to  the  intelligence 
or  the  discretion  of  the  nobility."  Amid  wild  applause 
the  suggestion  was  accepted.  Target  was  bidden  to  turn 
once  more  to  the  chamber  which  sheltered  the  delibera- 
tions of  the  clergy ;  and  at  his  heels  trod  a  deputation 
consisting  of  some  of  the  ablest  and  the  most  enthusi- 
astic of  the  assembled  Commons. 

The  appearance  of  Target,  the  expression  of  Mira- 
beau's  words,  had  a  profound  effect  upon  the  clergy. 
A  general  enthusiasm  appeared  to  be  spreading  among 
the  more  enlightened  and  the  more  impressionable, 
which  was  highly  distasteful  to  the  reactionaries.  Lu- 
bersac,  Bishop  of  Chartres,  whose  name  deserves  to  be 
remembered,  was  one  of  the  first  to  propose  that  the 
clergy  as  a  body  should,  at  that  very  moment  of  time, 
rise  and  betake  themselves  to  the  Commons'  Hall,  and 
forthwith  unite  themselves  with  their  brethren  of  the 
Third  Estates.  This  proposition  was  received  with 
rapturous  delight  by  a  large  body  of  the  clergy  pres- 
ent, but  the  reactionary  prelates  pleaded,  counselled, 
finally  prevailed ;  at  least,  that  is  to  say,  they  succeed- 


526  THE   FRENCH   REYULITIOX.  CH.  XXXIV. 

ed  in  delaying  the  wholesale  exodus  of  the  clergy  from 
the  Clergy  Chamber.  It  was  decided  to  postpone  the 
reply  until  to-morrow.  To-morrow  and  to-morrow  and 
to-morrow  had  crept  at  this  petty  pace  now  for  some 
time,  and  the  anti-national  prelates  hoped  for  further 
procrastination.  Could  not  influence  be  brought  to 
bear  upon  the  court?  could  not  the  Polignac  party 
press  and  be  pressed?  On  the  next  day,  May  28,  the 
clergy  solemnly  decided  to  suspend  all  discussion  upon 
the  proposition  of  the  Commons  until  the  result  of  fresh 
conferences.  The  anti  -  nationals  were  well  content. 
They  knew  that  a  letter  had  been  written,  or  rather 
accepted  by  the  king,  which  was  at  that  moment  being 
read  in  the  Commons.  That  letter  would  effect  much  : 
so  they  hoped,  and  devoutly  believed. 

The  royal  letter  had  different  fates  in  different  quar- 
ters. It  called  in  set  terms  upon  the  Commissioners  of 
Conciliation  to  meet  again  on  the  following  day,  in  the 
presence  of  the  keeper  of  the  seals,  in  order  to  try  once 
again  to  cause  a  fusion.  When  this  letter  came  to  the 
chamber  where  the  nobility  were  assembled,  the  nobil- 
ity were  in  a  state  of  white  heat  of  excitement.  Caza- 
les  and  D'Antraigues  had  just  been  making  flaming 
speeches,  in  which  they  insisted  that  the  division  of 
orders  and  the  respective  vetoes  should  be  declared 
constitutional.  The  session,  stimulated  to  giddiness  by 
the  clattering  and  rattling  inanities  of  the  fiery  Cazales 
and  the  fiery  D'Antraigues,  did  accordingly  vote  and 
decide,  by  a  majority  of  two  hundred  and  two  to  sixteen, 
that  "the  deliberation  by  order,  and  the  prohibitive 
faculty  which  the  orders  have  separately,  are  constitu- 
tional to  the  monarchy,"  and  that  it,  the  Noble  Estate, 
"  will  adhere  abidingly  to  those  guardian  principles  of 
the  throne  and  of  liberty."  As  those  high-sounding 


1789.  THE   ROYAL  LETTER.  527 

words  were  greeted  with  acclamation,  no  doubt  that 
Cazales  felt,  and  that  D'Antraigues  felt,  that  they  had 
between  them  deserved  very  well  of  their  country,  and 
had  preserved  the  monarchy  from  its  most  dangerous 
enemies.  The  Duke  of  Orleans  indeed,  and  Count  Cril- 
lon,  protested  against  the  declaration,  but  nobody  heed- 
ed them.  All  was  excitement,  enthusiasm,  high-flown 
devotion  to  the  monarchy  and  their  order.  It  was  in 
the  midst  of  all  this  passionate  effervescence  that  the 
Marquis  de  Breze  handed  the  president  the  letter  from 
the  king,  open  and  unaddressed,  as  was  usual  when  such 
a  document  was  sent  to  a  chamber  not  yet  constituted. 
But  effervescent  nobility  would  have  none  of  it.  They 
were  not  an  unconstituted  chamber,  they  were  a  duly 
constituted  chamber.  Cazales  and  D'Antraigues  had 
not  harangued  for  nothing ;  the  blood  of  the  nobility 
was  up ;  the  letter  must  needs  be  returned,  and  sent 
again  more  orderly.  M.  de  Breze  accordingly  with- 
drew, taking  his  letter  with  him,  and  returned  with  all 
despatch,  bearing  the  same  document  duly  arranged 
according  to  the  wishes  of  the  punctilious  nobility.  It 
was  characteristic  of  them,  in  that  hour,  to  think  that 
a  scrupulous  adherence  to  fine  formalities  might  really 
serve  to  stay  the  course  of  democracy  and  discontent. 

In  the  meantime  the  Commons  were  no  less  ani- 
mated, no  less  excited.  Their  proceedings  had  opened 
with  a  message  from  the  clergy,  announcing  the  receipt 
of  the  royal  letter,  and  in  consequence  the  postpone- 
ment of  any  decision  in  reply  to  yesterday's  Target 
demonstration.  Then  came  the  reading  of  the  royal 
letter,  a  sufficiently  foolish  letter. 

"  I  could  not  see  without  sorrow,"  the  poor  king  wrote, 
"  and  even  without  inquietude,  the  National  Assembly, 
which  I  had  convoked  in  order  that  it  might  occupy  it- 


528  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXXIV. 

self  with  me  in  the  regeneration  of  my  kingdom,  given 
over  to  an  inaction  which,  if  it  were  to  be  prolonged, 
would  dissipate  those  hopes  which  I  have  formed  for 
the  happiness  of  my  people  and  for  the  prosperity  of 
the  State."  The  king  was  wrong.  The  regeneration  of 
his  kingdom  was  being  worked  out  in  that  very  inac- 
tion which  he  so  much  deplored.  His  people,  for  whose 
happiness  he  was  so  concerned,  were  slipping  away  from 
his  royal,  paternal  authority  ;  and  it  was  not  the  elo- 
quence of  Cazales  and  D'Antraigues,  the  Rosencrantz 
and  Guildenstern  of  this  sorry  episode,  that  would  keep 
them  in  their  place  at  the  foot  of  the  throne.  However, 
Louis  thought,  it  would  seem,  that  the  best  thing  was 
to  try  again.  The  commissioners  of  the  three  orders 
should  meet  again  on  the  morrow,  in  the  presence  of 
the  keeper  of  the  seals,  and  certain  other  commission- 
ers that  the  king  would  send,  and  no  doubt  with  a  little 
deliberation  the  "harmony  so  desirable  and  so  urgent" 
would  be  realized. 

As  soon  as  the  letter  was  read,  Malouet,  always  pru- 
dent, always  cautious,  made  a  very  characteristic  prop- 
osition. He  proposed  that  the  discussion  should  be  car- 
ried on  in  secret,  and  that  strangers  should  be  ordered 
to  withdraw.  Thereupon  up  rose  and  thundered  at  him 
a  strange  figure — thundered,  or  tried  to  thunder,  rather, 
with  one  of  the  weakest  voices  in  the  world.  The  new 
speaker  bad  several  names.  His  family  name  was  Chas- 
seboeuf.  For  this  his  father  had  substituted  Boissirais. 
He  was  now  known  by  the  name  he  had  adopted  as 
Count  Constantin  Fran9ois  de  Volney.  Volney's  "  Ruins 
of  Empire  "  is  still  a  name,  and  little  more  than  a  name, 
in  literature.  Few  people,  we  fancy,  read  it  now,  and 
are  perturbed  or  pleased  by  its  reflections.  At  this 
time  it  was  not  even  written.  Count  de  Volney  was 


1789.  VOLNEY.  52g 

only  a  young  man,  a  little  over  thirty,  who  knew  Ara- 
bic, and  had  written  a  book  of  travels  in  Egypt  and 
Syria,  recently  published. 

"  What !"  the  fiery,  impetuous,  weak -voiced  Volney 
screamed.  "  Strangers  !  Who  talks  of  strangers  ?  Are 
they  not  our  friends  and  brothers  ?  Are  they  not  our 
fellow-citizens  ?  Is  it  not  they  who  have  done  us,  done 
you,  the  honor  of  electing  us  as  deputies?  We  have 
entered  upon  difficult  undertakings :  let,  then,  in  Heaven's 
name,  our  fellow-citizens  environ  us,  inspire  us,  animate 
us.  They  will  not,  indeed,  add  one  jot  to  the  courage  of 
the  man  who  truly  loves  his  land,  and  longs  to  serve 
her  ;  but  they  will  force  a  blush  to  the  cheek  of  the 
traitor  or  the  coward,  whom  the  court  or  cowardice  has 
already  been  able  to  corrupt."  Thus,  or  in  some  such 
wild  and  whirling  words,  did  Volney  harangue  the  Third 
Estate,  and  dissipate  prudent  Malouet's  proposal  to  the 
thin  air.  The  strangers  remained  to  listen,  with  due 
profit,  to  the  rest  of  the  debate,  which  was  finally  ad- 
journed without  any  decision  being  arrived  at. 

The  next  day  heard  more  discussion,  still  undecided, 
undefined.  Among  the  nobles,  an  energetic  Lally  Tol- 
lendal,  Paris  deputy,  friend  of  Necker,  son  of  the  fa- 
mous unhappy  governor  of  India,  made  various  sugges- 
tions, of  no  great  importance  and  with  no  great  effect. 
Lally  Tollendal  was  not  an  unremarkable  man.  The 
speech  he  made  was  not  a  bad  speech.  It  was,  perhaps, 
as  good  a  speech  as  could  be  made  in  favor  of  so  bad  a 
case.  It  is  not  to  be  found  in  the  Moniteur,  where,  in- 
deed, so  much  is  missing.  It  is  not  to  be  found  in  that 
"  Histoire  Parlementaire  de  la  Revolution  FranQaise " 
of  Buchez  and  of  Roux,  to  which  Carlyle  has  paid 
somewhat  scornful  compliments.  It  is  to  be  found  in 
that  magnificent  series  of  "  Archives  Populaires  "  which 
I.— 34 


530  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  XXXIV. 

is  being  brought  out  in  Paris  by  order  of  the  National 
Assembly,  under  the  direction  of  MM.  Mavidal,  Lau- 
rent, and  Clavel — a  series  of  inestimable  value  to  the 
student  of  the  French  Revolution.  We  have  seen  al- 
ready that  he  had,  after  long  and  unwearying  assiduity, 
succeeded  in  upsetting  the  judgment  passed  upon  his 
father.  He  passed  his  time  in  those  early  days  of  the 
States-General  in  alternately  encouraging  the  nobles  to 
resist  and  recommending  them  to  yield.  He  was  yet  to 
be  the  friend  of  Madame  de  Stae'l,  an  exile  in  England, 
and  at  last  a  peer  of  France.  He  was  not  the  man  for 
the  rough  work  of  revolutions.  We  need  not  see  or 
hear  much  more  of  him. 


1789.  MIRABEAU  ASSERTS   HIMSELF.  531 


CHAPTER  XXXV. 

SLOW   AND  SURE. 

IN  the  Hall  of  the  Third  Estate  the  lion  voice  was 
again  heard  thundering.  Mirabeau  was  every  day  as- 
serting himself  more  and  more.  Every  opportunity 
that  arose  only  brought  him  into  clearer  eminence  as 
the  strong  man  of  the  Third  Estate.  He  read  the  royal 
letter,  with  its  clumsily  concealed  purpose,  and  he  rent 
it  with  his  angry  eloquence.  "  This  is  a  snare,  only  a 
snare !"  he  cried  to  the  listening  Commons.  But  with 
ready  skill  he  exonerated  the  king  from  conscious  share 
in  the  duplicity.  Yet  why  did  the  king  interfere  at 
all  ?  he  asked.  There  was  no  reason,  no  justification  for 
his  interference.  The  Third  Estate  was  engaged  in  le- 
gitimate negotiation  with  the  other  two  orders.  It  had 
practically  succeeded  in  winning  the  clergy  to  its  side, 
and  might  reasonably  count  upon  soon  persuading  the 
nobility  to  follow  the  clerical  example.  Was  that  the 
moment  for  interference?  And  what  was  the  meaning 
of  this  royal  letter  ?  An  act,  indeed,  as  far  as  the  king 
personally  was  concerned,  of  goodness  and  of  patience 
and  of  courage,  but  none  the  less  a  snare  planned  by 
the  hands  of  men  who  had  given  their  royal  master  an 
inexact  picture  of  the  state  of  affairs,  a  snare  woven  by 
the  hands  of  Druids.  It  was  a  snare  if  they  acceded  to 
the  demands  of  the  king ;  it  was  a  snare  if  they  refused ; 
it  was  a  snare  every  way.  If  they  accepted,  every- 
thing would  finish,  as  in  1589,  by  an  Order  of  Council, 


532  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXV. 

If  they  refused,  the  throne  would  be  besieged  with  loud 
clamors  against  their  insubordination,  and  new  strength 
would  be  lent  to  the  absurd  calumnies  that  the  Consti- 
tution was  in  peril  from  the  democracy.  Mirabeau  pro- 
posed, therefore,  that  an  address  should  be  presented  to 
the  king,  that  the  commissioners  should  do  everything 
in  their  power  to  effect  the  meeting  of  the  conference 
in  the  common  hall,  the  Salle  des  Menus,  and  that  they 
should  seek  to  restore  concord  between  the  three  orders 
without  touching  upon  any  of  the  principles  which  the 
Third  Estate  represented. 

After  a  long  debate  the  meeting  adjourned  at  half- 
past  three,  to  meet  again  at  five  o'clock,  when  the  de- 
bate was  resumed  and  protracted  until  half-past  ten  at 
night.  It  was  then  finally  resolved  that  the  Commons 
accept  the  proposed  conference  under  three  conditions  : 
First,  that  a  deputation  should  be  sent  to  the  king  to 
assure  him  of  the  respectful  homage  of  his  faithful  Com- 
mons. Secondly,  that  the  conference  should  be  held 
on  the  day  and  hour  that  his  Majesty  should  indicate. 
Thirdly,  that  a  formal  report  should  be  drawn  up  of 
each  sitting,  signed  by  every  member  who  was  present. 

This  decision  to  accept  the  proposed  conference  marks 
a  fresh  crisis  in  the  constitutional  struggle,  marks  off  a 
fresh  point  of  departure.  The  three  orders,  separated 
for  so  long,  were  brought  as  it  were  face  to  face  again, 
through  their  commissioners,  and  watched  each  other 
warily,  like  gladiators  in  the  arena.  So  far,  the  Third 
Estate,  upon  the  whole,  had  had  the  best  of  it.  It 
seemed  upon  the  point  of  success  when  the  royal  letter 
came.  The  manner  in  which  it  accepted  the  royal  pro- 
posal was  in  itself  a  point  in  its  favor.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  nobility  were  as  arrogant,  as  self-confident,  as 
overbearing  as  ever,  and  the  clergy,  who  had  vacillated 


1789.  THE  COMMONS  AND  THE   KING.  533 

under  the  steady,  persistent  pressure  of  the  Third  Estate, 
were  beginning  to  swing  back  into  their  old  pronounced 
sympathy  with  the  other  privileged  order.  The  action 
of  the  court  in  forcing  the  hand  of  the  king  had  encour- 
aged the  reactionaries  in  the  two  camps.  They  now 
thought  that  continuous  firmness  was  alone  necessary 
to  dissipate  the  resistance  and  display  the  weakness  of 
the  Third  Estate.  Under  such  conditions  of  wary  an- 
tagonism the  conference  was  to  begin. 

In  the  mean  time  the  Commons  had  some  ado  to  get 
their  address  presented  to  the  king.  On  the  day  after 
the  address  was  resolved  upon,  May  30th,  the  Keeper  of 
the  Seals  informed  the  Third  Estate  that  the  king,  being 
about  to  depart,  could  not  receive  the  Commons'  depu- 
tation, but  would  fix  a  day  and  hour  when  he  would  re- 
ceive it.  This  reply  meant  a  good  deal  more  than  it 
said.  It  was  the  time-honored  custom  that  such  an  in- 
dividual as  the  representative  of  the  Third  Estate  would 
be  on  this  occasion  should  address  the  king  on  his  knees. 
This  was  the  sort  of  venerable  ceremonial  to  which  the 
Third  Estate  in  their  present  mood  were  scarcely  like- 
ly to  allow  any  representative  of  theirs  to  submit.  It 
seemed,  therefore,  to  the  courtly  mind  the  simplest  plan 
to  postpone  the  troublesome  matter  on  the  good  old 
courtly  principle. 

On  May  30th,  when  the  letter  of  the  Keeper  of  the 
Seals  was  read  out  to  the  Third  Estate  by  their  dean,  a 
point  of  some  difficulty  was  immediately  raised.  Al- 
though the  king  had  postponed  the  reception  of  the  dep- 
utation, yet  the  first  meeting  of  the  joint  commissioners 
was  to  take  place  that  same  evening.  Now,  some  o'f  the 
members  present  argued  that  if  the  commissioners  of 
the  Third  Estate  attended  the  conference,  they  would, 
by  so  doing,  stultify  the  resolution  at  which  the  Com- 


634  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXV. 

mons  had  arrived  on  the  previous  day — namely,  that  the 
conference  should  be  resumed  only  after  the  royal  re- 
ception of  the  deputation.  Hereupon  other  members 
arose,  and  declared  no  less  confidently  that  the  resolu- 
tion of  the  previous  day  decided  upon  the  deputation 
and  the  renewal  of  the  conferences,  but  did  not,  by  the 
use  of  the  word  "  after,"  make  the  conferences  condi- 
tional upon  the  reception  of  the  deputation.  There  was 
quite  a  lengthy  wrangle  over  this  point,  which  it  was 
found  impossible  to  settle,  and  no  official  record  (of  any 
kind)  of  the  proceedings  was  kept.  The  memories  of 
different  members  clashed.  The  notes  which  different 
deputies  took  for  themselves  in  their  private  pocket- 
books,  on  being  consulted,  were  found  to  clash  also. 
Luckily,  the  Marquis  de  Rostaing  found  a  solution  of 
the  difficulty.  Let  us,  he  said,  go  on  with  the  confer- 
ences, but  let  us  also  resolve  not  to  conclude  them  until 
our  deputation  has  been  received  by  his  Majesty.  This 
suggestion  was  accepted  unanimously  by  the  Commons, 
who  were  very  keen  about  their  deputation  coming  to 
pass.  That  it  was  undoubtedly  the  original  intention 
of  the  proposers  of  the  deputation  that  it  should  pre- 
cede the  renewal  of  the  conferences  is,  however,  made 
perfectly  clear  by  a  study  of  the  text  of  the  address 
drawn  up  for  the  deputation  to  present  to  the  king,  an 
address  which  was  read  to  the  Third  Estate  on  this  very 
May  30th  by  their  dean. 

There  was  indeed  some  excuse  for  the  unwillingness 
of  the  monarch  to  welcome  the  deputation  from  his 
faithful  Commons.  His  eldest  son,  the  young  Dauphin 
of  France,  was  sick,  sick  unto  death.  Poor  little  Louis 
Joseph  Xavier  of  France  !  he  had  been  ailing  now  for 
nearly  three  years,  his  puny  body  wasted,  and  his  scant 
strength  sapped  by  slow  and  weakening  disease.  The 


1789.  THE   LITTLE   DAUPHIN.  535 

luckless  life  that  had  been  so  eagerly  looked  for,  that 
had  first  fluttered  its  faint  flame  on  October  22,  1781, 
was  now  waning  rapidly  to  its  close.  Scarcely  eight 
years  all  told  of  childish  life,  and  now  it  was  about  to 
flicker  from  a  world  that  was  growing  too  stormy  for 
princes.  There  had  always  been  anxiety  about  the  Dau- 
phin. In  more  than  one  of  her  letters  to  her  brother 
Joseph  of  Austria,  Marie  Antoinette  speaks  with  evi- 
dent anxiety  of  the  child's  health.  In  a  letter  written 
in  the  September  of  1783  she  speaks  of  the  folly  of  the 
physicians  in  not  wishing  the  little  Dauphin  to  make 
the  journey  to  Fontainebleau,  "although  he  has  twenty 
teeth,  and  is  exceedingly  strong."  In  the  December  of 
the  same  year  she  wrote  again, "My  son  is  marvellously 
healthy  ;  I  found  him  strengthened  and  speaking  well." 
A  little  later  in  the  same  month  she  wrote,  "  Every 
one  is  amazed  at  the  splendid  condition  in  which  my 
son  came  back  from  La  Muette."  Now  the  end  of  the 
little  life  had  come.  "  She  should  have  died  hereafter," 
says  Macbeth,  in  the  bitterness  of  his  heart,  when  he 
hears  of  his  consort's  death  in  the  stormy  hours  of  strug- 
gle which  leave  no  time  for  tears.  Something  of  the 
same  kind  might  have  been  said  over  the  dying  Dau- 
phin. There  was  no  time  for  tears  then.  France,  in 
the  first  throes  of  its  great  constitutional  travail,  scarce- 
ly noted  the  drooping  of  the  little  royal  head.  It  drop- 
ped at  last,  tired  of  life,  on  the  night  of  June  3d.  He 
had  been  a-dying  through  all  the  angry  days  from  May 
28th,  and  the  sorrow  of  the  father  pleaded  its  defence 
for  the  reluctance  of  the  king  to  receive  the  deputation. 
In  their  address,  in  language  of  the  utmost  respect 
for  the  sovereign,  the  Third  Estate  set  forth  its  own 
case  with  considerable,  indeed  with  suflicient  boldness. 
It  shared  the  royal  regrets  at  the  inaction  of  the  States- 


536  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXV. 

General,  but  threw  the  blame  of  that  inaction  entirely 
upon  the  shoulders  of  the  nobility.  With  a  certain 
cautious  irony  the  address  assured  the  king  of  the  con- 
fidence which  the  Third  Estate  felt  in  his  fairness  and 
reason  to  prevent  any  attempt  or  encroachment  upon 
the  liberties  of  the  Assembly.  By  a  bold  stroke  the 
address  endeavored  to  ally  the  king  in  common  cause 
with  the  Third  Estate  against  "  those  different  aristoc- 
racies whose  power  can  only  be  established  upon  the 
ruin  of  the  royal  authority  and  of  the  public  weal." 
It  finally  assured  the  monarch  that  when  the  Commons 
had  the  duly  constituted  right  to  address  him,  he  should 
speedily  be  able  to  judge  of  their  fidelity  to  the  honor 
and  dignity  of  the  Throne  and  the  credit  of  the  nation. 
Such  was  the  remarkable  document  which  was  to  be 
submitted  to  an  astonished  king  as  soon  as  might  be. 

On  the  evening  of  May  30th,  at  six  o'clock,  the  con- 
ference began  at  the  Chancellery  of  Versailles.  The 
Keeper  of  the  Seals  was  accompanied  by  the  commis- 
sioners named  by  the  king — the  Duke  de  Nivernois, 
De  la  Michodiere,  D'Ormesson,  Vidaud  de  la  Tour,  De 
Chaumont  de  la  Galaisiere,  the  Count  de  Montmorin, 
Laurent  de  Villedeuil,  the  Count  de  la  Luzerne,  the 
Count  de  Puysegur,  the  Count  de  Saint-Priest,  Valdec 
de  Lessart,  and  Necker.  To  these  august  presences,  to 
these  shadows  of  great  names,  came  the  commissioners 
of  the  Third  Estate  wifh  their  minds  pretty  clearly 
made  up — came  the  commissioners  of  the  nobility  with 
what  they  were  pleased  to  call  their  minds  quite  made 
up — came  the  commissioners  of  the  clergy  with  their 
minds  in  a  more  or  less  vacillating  and  perplexed  con- 
dition. Probably  a  more  hopeless,  more  meaningless 
conference  was  never  yet  attended  by  men. 

The  conference  opened  with  a  well-meant  attempt  on 


1789.  THE  RIGHT  OF  THE  NOBILITY.  537 

the  part  of  one  of  the  clergy  to  propose  a  plan  of  con- 
ciliation. This  plan,  or  rather  this  proposal  of  a  plan, 
was  promptly  set  aside  in  favor  of  a  preliminary  dis- 
cussion of  principles  and  facts.  Then  D'Antraigues,  the 
storm-petrel  of  his  party's  suicide,  got  up  and  made 
one  of  the  most  imbecile  orations  that  ever  yet  fell 
from  a  foolish  mouth.  He  began  by  declaring  that  the 
action  of  the  nobility  was  just  the  one  right,  just,  rea- 
sonable, and,  as  it  were,  Heaven-inspired  course  of  ac- 
tion which  they  were  bound  to  take.  This  fine  theory 
of  noble  infallibility  he  proceeded  to  back  by  a  long 
string  of  arguments  founded  on  the  actions  of  previous 
States-Generals.  What  other  States-Generals  had  done 
they  might  do — -such  was  the  drift  of  his  argument — 
but  not  a  jot  more.  There  is  something  piteous,  some- 
thing pathetic,  in  this  desperate,  wooden-headed  way  in 
which  the  champion  of  the  claims  of  the  nobility  meets 
a  wholly  new  condition  of  things  with  a  string  of  musty 
usages  and  rusty  traditions.  Fiery -hot  D'Antraigues 
might  almost  as  reasonably  and  pertinently  argue  that 
because  Clovis  split  the  skull  of  one  of  his  soldiers  on 
a  memorable  occasion,  therefore  his  Sacred  Majesty  the 
sixteenth  Louis  of  the  line  of  Capet  would  be  justified 
in  braining,  with  a  battle-axe  swung  in  his  own  royal 
hands,  the  contumelious  and  audacious  instigators  of 
the  Third  Estate.  There  was  a  brawling,  wrangling 
debate  upon  meaningless  D'Antraigues  meaningless 
speech,  which  lasted  for  some  four  hours.  A  member  of 
the  Third  Estate,  whose  name  fame  does  not  appear  to 
have  very  jealously  preserved,  replied  to  D'Antraigues. 
He  argued  that  at  the  time  of  the  States -General  of 
1560,  of  1576,  of  1588,  and  1614,  the  powers  were  veri- 
fied, not  by  order,  but  by  government,  and  that  there- 
fore the  nobility  could  not  even  invoke  ancient  usages 


538  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXV. 

in  favor  ot  its  pretensions.  To  this  an  indignant  noble 
retorted  that  it  was  the  right  and  privilege  of  nobles 
to  be  judged  only  by  their  peers.  To  this  a  champion 
of  the  Commons  replied  that  there  was  in  the  matter 
under  discussion  no  question  whatever  of  judgment 
of  a  crime  to  which  the  pretended  privilege  referred. 
Then  one  of  the  nobles  carried  the  war  into  the  camp 
of  the  Third  Estate,  by  contesting  the  right  to  style 
themselves  "Commons;"  an  "  innovation  of  words  which 
might  lead  to  an  innovation  of  principles,  if  indeed  it 
had  not  done  so  already."  The  discussion,  if  discussion 
it  can  be  called,  was  finally  adjourned  until  June  8d,  over 
the  days  of  festival. 


1V89.  THE  ARBITER  OF  FRANCE.  539 


CHAPTER   XXXVI. 

ON   AND    ON. 

IT  was  worth  while  to  follow  with  so  much  attention 
the  delays  and  doubts,  the  vacillations  and  strivings, 
the  tentative  endeavors  of  the  curious  agglomeration 
of  human  beings  from  all  the  ends  of  France  which  was 
known  for  a  season  to  the  world  as  the  Third  Estate. 
For  since  history  began  to  be  recorded  no  more  remark- 
able process  of  growth  has  been  inscribed  upon  its 
pages  than  the  gradual  growth  or  even  crystallization 
of  the  inchoate  mass  of  simple  members,  unverified  dep- 
uties to  the  States-General,  unorganized  members  of  a 
new  and  bewildering  Third  Estate,  into  a  National  As- 
sembly which  was  to  change  the  fate  of  France.  As 
we  follow  the  slow  process  day  by  day  we  can  wellnigh 
witness  the  steady  quickening  of  the  almost  inert  mass 
into  a  consciousness  of  its  own  strength,  of  its  own  pos- 
sible power.  We  can  note  its  stubborn  determination 
to  be,  and  to  have  not  merely  its  right  of  being,  but  its 
actual  being  recognized,  waxing  stronger  with  every 
coming  together  in  the  Salle  des  Menus.  We  can  watch, 
too,  with  interest,  how  there,  as  in  all  assemblages  of 
men,  the  stronger  come  to  the  front ;  how  a  Mirabeau, 
with  no  official  position,  yet  naturally  takes  distinct 
and  persistent  headship;  how  even  the  thin  small  voice 
of  an  obscure  and  unheeded  Robespierre  also  assert- 
ed itself  at  the  right  time,  and  made  its  due  claim 
upon  the  attention  of  fellow-men.  It  was  not  merely  a 


540  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXVI. 

National  Assembly  or  a  new  Constitution  that  slowly 
fermented  during  those  lingering  hours  of  disappoint- 
ment and  delay.  It  was  a  new  France,  and  a  new  world. 

To  us  of  to-day,  with  our  knowledge  of  what  was  in 
the  future  for  these  men,  there  can  scarcely  be  much 
grimmer  or  more  pathetic  reading  than  the  reports  in  the 
Moniteur  or  elsewhere  of  those  early  meetings,  of  the 
early  speeches,  and  of  their  speakers.  The  shadow  of 
death  is  over  it  all.  As  we  are  confronted  with  name 
after  name  of  each  of  those  men,  the  brilliant,  the  am- 
bitious, the  well-intentioned,  the  hopeful,  the  heroic,  we 
think  of  the  fate  of  each,  and  can  scarcely  avoid  a 
shudder.  It  is  a  very  necrology,  the  list  of  those  eager 
Parliamentarians.  The  words  "  was  guillotined,"  with 
the  date,  affix  themselves  in  our  fancy  to  name  after 
name  as  we  read.  A  few,  it  is  true,  escape  the  guillo- 
tine. Some  die  too  soon,  like  Mirabeau.  Some  die  too 
late,  like  Sieyes,  refusing  in  his  dotage,  many  a  long 
year  later,  to  receive  Monsieur  de  Robespierre,  whose 
ghost  had  long  since  wandered  by  Cocytus.  Some  live 
to  be  a  councillor  of  state,  like  Mourner,  or  to  die  poor, 
like  Malouet.  But  for  the  rest,  all  the  more  important 
figures  are  like  forest-trees  marked  for  the  inevitable 
axe.  The  ingenious  machine  to  which  their  latest  col- 
league, Dr.  Guillotin,  of  Paris,  will  give  a  name,  must 
be  the  doom  of  so  many  of  them  who  then  thought  of 
no  such  thing,  who  feared  if  at  all  only  the  attacks  of  a 
despotism,  and  who  dreamed  of  liberty  and  a  Saturnian 
age.  If  any  one  of  all  those  deputies  had  been  gifted 
with  that  strange  Scottish  power  of  second  sight  which 
environs  with  a  misty  veil  those  destined  to  untimely 
and  violent  deaths,  the  most  conspicuous  heads  in  that 
assembly  would  have  been  so  veiled  that  day. 

While  the  conference   was  going  on  the  discussion 


1789.  JEAN   SYLVAIN   BAILLY.  541 

over  the  deputation  to  the  king  was  going  on  too.  The 
Third  Estate  had  resolved  to  elect  a  dean  every  eight 
days.  The  dean  who  was  elected  when  the  deputation 
was  proposed  happened  to  be  M.  d'Ailly.  M.  d'Ailly 
resigned  his  functions,  almost  immediately  after  being 
invested  with  them,  on  the  ground  of  bad  health.  It 
became  necessary  to  choose  a  new  dean,  and  by  a  large 
majority  Bailly  was  elected  to  the  post.  This  was  the 
first  important  appearance  upon  the  scene  of  a  figure 
destined  to  be  conspicuous  and  unhappy.  There  are 
few  sights  more  melancholy  than  that  of  a  man  of  quiet 
scholastic  life  suddenly  flung  into  the  strife  of  fierce  po- 
litical life  at  some  moment  of  great  national  struggle. 
Jean  Sylvain  Bailly  was  eminently  in  his  place  at  the 
Academy  of  Sciences,  eminently  in  his  place  in  his 
astronomical  observatory  outwatching  the  stars,  emi- 
nently in  his  place  at  his  familiar  desk  writing  prize 
treatises  on  Leibnitz,  and  an  excellent,  even  brilliant 
history  of  astronomy,  ancient  and  modern.  It  was  un- 
happily not  enough  for  Bailly  to  be  the  only  French- 
man save  Fontenelle  who  had  the  honor  to  be  a  mem- 
ber of  the  three  great  academies  of  Paris.  He  must 
have  his  share  of  civic  life,  must  serve  his  country  as  a 
good  citizen  should,  must  needs  be  ambitious,  most  hon- 
orably ambitious,  to  play  a  part  in  politics.  An  appre- 
ciative Parisian  public  voted  him  to  the  States-General, 
and  handed  him  over  to  the  headsman.  He  was  an  hon- 
orable, high-minded  man,  a  scholar,  and  a  gentleman, 
but  he  was  more  in  his  element  among  the  wheeling 
worlds  of  space  than  in  the  wheeling  humanities  of  a 
revolution.  Better  for  him  if  he  had  kept  his  eyes 
among  the  stars,  like  the  hero  of  Richter's  exquisite 
story.  He  could  indeed  help  the  Revolution  on  its 
way.  His  simple  noble  nature  was  one  of  the  orna- 


542  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXVI. 

ments  of  the  Third  Estate.  But  he  could  not  guide 
the  Revolution,  or  largely  help  to  guide  it,  and  he  cer- 
tainly could  not  stop  it,  as  he  tried  in  vain  to  do.  As 
well  might  he  have  hoped  by  stern  concentration  of  his 
astronomer's  mind  to  play  the  part  of  a  new  Joshua, 
and  stay  the  revolutions  of  the  sun,  as  to  stay  the  revo- 
lution of  the  forces  around  him.  Under  happier  condi- 
tions, and  in  more  tranquil  times,  he  might  have  earned 
a  distinguished  place  among  a  nation's  representatives, 
but  the  stormy  tides  of  an  insurgent  and  desperate  de- 
mocracy were  too  strong  for  him.  His  mild,  intelligent 
face  was  not  the  face  of  a  man  born  to  sway  the  multi- 
tude. His  high  forehead  sloping  back  from  an  exceed- 
ingly aquiline  nose,  his  large  benign  eye,  the  full  cheeks 
and  slightly  heavy  lower  face,  the  mobile  mouth,  sensu- 
ous rather  than  sensual — all  these  were  characteristics 
of  intelligence,  of  delicacy  of  mind,  of  qualities  excel- 
lent in  a  scientific  man  who  was  also  a  man  of  letters  ; 
excellent  even  for  a  statesman  in  serene  hours,  but  not 
strong  enough  to  dominate  the  Carmagnola  of  sans-cu- 
lottes  into  which  the  destinies  were  driving  France. 

There  was  a  good  deal  of  small  altercation  going  on 
in  these  days  in  the  chamber  of  the  Third  Estate.  The 
refusal  of  the  king  to  receive  the  Commons'  deputation 
was  in  especial  a  fruitful  theme  of  debate.  On  June 
2d  M.  d'Ailly,  as  dean  of  the  Third  Estate,  proposed  to 
make  some  modifications  in  the  address  to  the  king,  as 
resolved  upon  at  the  session  of  May  30th.  The  proposed 
alterations  were  not  accepted  by  the  bureau,  which  ad- 
hered to  the  original  address  with  some  slight  modifica- 
tions. A  rather  sharp  debate  arose  over  these  modifi- 
cations, which,  according  to  some  members  of  the 
bureau,  were  purely  nominal,  and  according  to  one  of 
the  members  of  the  bureau,  were  of  a  nature  highly  prej- 


1789.  THE   KING  AND   THE  THIRD   ESTATE.  543 

udicial  to  the  Assembly.  Some  of  those  present  called 
for  the  rereading  of  the  original  address,  that  the  exact 
nature  of  the  changes  introduced  might  be  made  known. 
Others  demanded  the  reading  of  the  second  address 
proposed  by  M.  d'Ailly  and  now  withdrawn.  Others 
were  opposed  to  any  rereading  as  useless  and  profit- 
less. Others  again  urged  that  if  there  were  to  be  any 
rereading,  all  strangers  present  should  be  compelled 
to  retire.  Some  were  for  placing  implicit  confidence 
in  the  wisdom  and  discretion  of  the  gentlemen  of  the 
bureau.  Some  thought  that  to  do  so  was  to  endow 
the  bureau  with  far  too  much  authority.  In  the  end 
a  decision  against  rereading  was  carried  by  185  votes 
to  114. 

On  the  next  day,  June  3d,  the  deputation  question 
came  up  again.  By  this  time,  as  we  have  seen,  M. 
d'Ailly  had  resigned  his  deanship — possibly  that  re- 
jected second  address  may  have  had  something  to  do 
with  it — and  Bailly  had  been  chosen  dean  in  his  place. 
There  was  much  complaining  against  the  action,  or 
rather  the  inaction,  of  the  king.  Susceptible  constitu- 
tionalism pointed  out  that  while  the  deputations  from 
the  clergy  and  the  nobility  had  been  received  with 
alacrity  and  enthusiasm,  the  most  meaningless  delay 
was  placed  in  the  way  of  the  deputation  from  the 
Third  Estate.  Even  the  sickness  of  the  Dauphin  was 
not  admitted  to  be  a  valid  excuse.  In  such  a  moment, 
it  was  argued,  a  sorrowing  monarch  ought  to  have  all 
the  more  need  and  desire  for  the  support  and  sympathy 
of  his  faithful  Commons.  Under  all  which  considera- 
tions it  seemed  quite  clear  to  the  susceptible  consti- 
tutionalism of  the  Third  Estate  that  further  pressure 
must  be  put,  and  that  promptly,  upon  the  king.  Bailly 
declared  that  though  it  was  exceedingly  difficult  to  get 


544  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XXXVI. 

admission  to  the  king,  still  he  was  entirely  in  the  hands 
of  the  Third  Estate.  If  they  bade  him,  he  would  do  all 
in  his  power  to  get  into  the  presence  of  his  sovereign. 
Thereupon  Mirabeau,  looking  as  usual  straight  to  the 
heart  of  the  matter  —  not,  perhaps,  we  may  imagine, 
without  arousing  even  already  some  slight  jealousy  in 
the  less  impetuous  and  also  less  masterly  mind  of  Bailly 
— proposed  that  Bailly  should  request  the  king  to  name 
a  time  when  he  would  receive  the  deputation  of  the 
Commons.  This  motion  was  easily  carried  unanimous- 
ly, but  Bailly  found  it  hard  to  carry  out. 

It  was  hard  for  the  Commons  to  get  at  their  king. 
He  was  more  and  more  in  the  hands  of  the  nobles,  and 
the  policy  of  the  nobles  as  a  body  was  the  policy  of  the 
feather-headed  D'Antraigues.  Count  Henri  de  Launai 
d'Antraigues  was  the  hero  of  the  hour  with  the  gentle- 
men of  the  noble  estate.  Young,  handsome,  ambitious, 
frothily  eloquent,  he  was  eminently  skilful,  for  a  time 
at  least,  in  winning  the  hearts  of  men  and  women.  Per- 
haps even  while  he  was  making  his  flaming  harangues 
to  a  delighted  chamber  of  nobility  he  had  against  his 
heart  some  latest  love-letter  of  the  beautiful  Saint- 
Huberty,  the  exquisite  Anne  Antoinette,  whose  acting 
delighted  Paris,  and  whose  generous  heart  was  now  en- 
tirely at  the  feet  of  the  rhetorical  young  noble  from 
Languedoc.  The  eloquent  Languedocian  gentleman, 
the  much -beloved,  much- loving  Magdalen  Saint -Hu- 
berty,  bound  together  for  the  hour  by  the  bonds  of  a 
facile  passion,  were  bound  together  for  a  dreary  destiny 
and  a  dismal  end.  For  the  moment,  however,  D'An- 
traigues was  flushed  with  pride  of  his  fair  mistress. 
For  the  moment  the  Saint-Huberty,  forgetting  all  pred- 
ecessors from  Sieur  Croisilles,  her  rogue  of  a  husband, 
downward,  was  rapturously  devoted  to  her  shining 


1789.  COUNT   D'ANTRAIGUES.  545 

politician  lover.  For  some  time  the  young  D'An- 
traigues  had  been  quite  a  conspicuous  figure  in  Paris. 
He  boasted  an  illustrious  descent.  He  claimed  as  an 
ancestor  the  distinguished  gentleman  and  soldier  to 
whom,  when  he  was  wounded,  Henri  Quatre  wrote  ut- 
tering the  most  royal  and  chivalrous  wishes  for  his 
speedy  restoration.  Parisian  society  not  altogether  un^ 
reservedly  accepted  him  at  his  own  estimation.  There 
were  not  wanting  sneering  sceptics  who  denied  him  all 
patent  of  nobility.  His  name,  said  these  sceptics,  was 
not  D'Anti-aigues  at  all ;  it  was  Audanel,  the  anagram 
of  De  Launai,  and  the  name  which  he  signed  as  a  pseu- 
donym to  some  of  his  political  pamphlets.  Envious 
tongues  even  went  so  far  as  to  insinuate  that  he  had 
been,  as  it  were,  drummed  out  of  a  regiment  of  Viva- 
rois  for  poltroonery  in  some  affair  of  honor.  It  is  true 
that  Barau,  in  his  history  of  the  families  of  Rouergue, 
cited  by  M.  Edmond  de  Goncourt,  declares  that  the 
House  of  Launai  owned  among  others  the  seigneury  of 
Antraigues,  and  that  the  land  was  invested  with  the 
privilege  of  carrying  the  title  of  count  by  letters-pat- 
ent of  September,  1668,  for  the  benefit  of  Trophime  de 
Launai,  granduncle  of  our  "  young  Languedocian  gen- 
tleman." At  the  same  time  Barau  admits  that  when 
our  D'Antraigues  came  to  Paris  and  solicited  the  hon- 
ors of  the  court  he  could  not  completely  furnish  the 
necessary  proofs.  It  is  certain  that  when  Mirabeau  as- 
sailed him  in  his  pamphlet,  "  Lettre  de  M.  le  Comte  de 
Mirabeau  a  M.  le  Comte  d'Antraigues,"  for  his  sudden 
adhesion  to  the  cause  of  the  noble  order  and  his  attacks 
upon  the  Third  Estate,  the  Proven9al  rallied  the  Langue- 
docian upon  his  sham  nobility.  Mirabeau  declared  that 
the  Vivorais  deputy  had  converted  himself  into  a  D'An- 
traigues to  the  great  astonishment  of  his  worthy  parent, 
I.— 35 


546  THE   FRENCII    REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXVI. 

who  had  never  considered  himself  to  be  descended  from 
that  noble  house,  but  had  simply  written  himself  "  D'En- 
traigues,"  taking  that  name  from  a  little  house  built  in 
a  marsh.  It  is  curious,  in  confirmation  of  this,  that  M. 
de  Goncourt  cites  letters  from  the  son  of  D'Antraigues 
and  the  Saint-Huberty,  in  which  the  son  always  signs 
himself  D'Entraigues. 

Whether  illustriously  noble  or  not,  D'Antraigues 
passed  for  illustriously  noble  with  a  not  too  critical 
Parisian  society.  He  carried  himself  like  a  gentleman 
of  a  good  house;  his  mother  was  a  Saint- Priest;  he  had 
sufficient  means  to  move  with  ease  in  the  capital ;  he 
had  travelled  considerably ;  he  was  regarded  in  cer- 
tain circles  as  a  very  rising  man.  In  a  world  of  actors 
and  actresses,  of  men  of  science  and  men  of  letters,  of 
philosophers  and  wits,  of  thinkers  and  triflers,  he  passed 
for  brilliantly  accomplished — destined  to  great  things. 
He  was  supposed  to  be  an  ardent  advocate  of  the  rights 
and  claims  of  the  people — rights  and  claims  which  it 
was  daringly  popular  to  talk  about  and  to  recognize. 
His  ready  meridional  flow  of  speech,  his  easily  fired 
imagination,  his  swiftly  roused,  slightly  meaningless 
warmth  of  words,  all  profoundly  impressed  an  easily  im- 
pressionable audience.  Then  he  was  very  good-looking. 
A  portrait  of  him  exists  by  Carmontelle,  the  dramatist 
and  painter.  The  young  count  is  represented  in  the 
company  of  Montbarre,  listening  to  the  minister  with 
his  sword  at  his  side,  seated  across  a  chair,  with  one 
arm  hanging  on  the  back,  while  his  fine  profilo,  his 
bright  eye,  the  magnificence  of  his  dress,  and  the  ele- 
gant nonchalance  of  his  bearing,  says  De  Goncourt, 
make  a  perfect  portrait  of  a  graceful  courtier.  He  had 
been  Madame  de  Saint-Huberty's  lover  for  some  five 
years  before  he  came  at  all  conspicuously  before  the 


1789.  A  FEATHER-IIEAD   STATESMAN.  547 

political  world  by  his  very  revolutionary'"  Memoirs  on 
the  States-General." 

Luckless,  unreliable  D'Antraigues  was  perhaps  the 
most  foolishly  feather  -  headed  gentleman  who  ever 
came  from  Languedoc.  We  may  meet  with  him  again, 
it  may  be  once  or  twice,  but  we  may  as  well  glance 
over  the  rest  of  his  unlovely  career  now,  and  say  good- 
bye to  him.  He  belonged  to  that  strange,  perplexing, 
impulsive,  imaginative,  unreliable  breed  which  has  en- 
riched modern  literature  with  a  Numa  Roumestan  and 
a  Tartarin  de  Tarascon.  We  should  prefer  that  he 
might  linger  in  our  memory — if  he  lingered  there  at 
all — as  the  sentimental  lover  of  the  Saint-Huberty,  ad- 
dressing his  opera-house  deity  in  the  high-flown  senti- 
mentalisins  of  Rousseau,  and  as  the  eloquent  champion 
of  popular  rights,  but  that  is  unhappily  not  possible. 
He  was  a  renegade  and  turn -coat;  the  moment  he 
found  himself  among  the  noble  order  of  the  States-Gen- 
eral he  swung  round  upon  the  political  circle  and  be- 
came the  impassioned,  we  might  say  the  vulgarly  im- 
passioned, champion  of  the  Old  Order  and  all  its 
works  and  ways.  We  need  not  accuse  him  of  being 
grossly  insincere  in  his  conversion.  Such  a  feather- 
head  had  no  real  principles,  no  real  opinions.  He  was 
swept  away  by  the  impulse  of  the  moment,  the  emo- 
tion of  the  hour ;  he  had  never  been  true  to  a  friend, 
man  or  woman  ;  he  could  not  be  true  to  any  cause.  As 
it  had  stimulated  his  excitable  Southern  imagination  to 
pose  as  the  champion  of  an  oppressed  people,  so  in  the 
heated  atmosphere  of  the  noble  chamber  it  pleased  him 
to  play  at  serving  an  assailed  monarchy,  and  lending 
his  bright  eloquence  to  the  cause  of  an  ancient  nobility. 

He  was  intoxicated  by  the  flow  of  his  own  words,  by 
his  own  cheap  tinselled  ideas,  by  his  conviction  that  he 


548  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXVI. 

was  a  great  statesman.  It  was  certainly  in  an  evil  day 
for  the  nobility  of  France  and  the  supporters  of  the 
Old  Order  when  they  came  to  have  such  a  champion. 
It  is,  however,  consolatory  to  reflect  that  D'Antraigues 
rendered  better  service  to  the  cause  of  liberty  by  his 
opposition  to  it  than  he  could  ever  have  rendered  it 
by  his  support.  His  renegade  popularity  was  of  brief 
duration.  It  is  written  concerning  him  that  he  will 
presently  emigrate,  that  he  will  marry  the  Saint-Hu- 
berty,  that  he  will  drift  from  European  court  to  Euro- 
pean court,  offering  his  worthless  services  against  his 
own  country.  He  will  become  member  of  the  Russian 
Legation  at  Dresden,  and  betray  the  secret  papers  of 
his  master,  the  Emperor  Alexander,  to  England.  He 
will  be  regarded  by  royalists  and  emigres  as  le  beau 
conjure,  and  considered  as  a  kind  of  Royalist  Marat, 
ready  on  the  return  of  royalism  to  ask  for  four  hun- 
dred thousand  heads.  He  will  be  reported,  if  not  be- 
lieved, to  have  accused  himself  with  pride  of  getting 
rid  of  sympathizers  with  the  Revolution  by  poison. 
He  will  settle  down  in  England,  near  London,  at  Barnes 
Terrace.  He  will  write  doleful  and  pitiful  complaints 
against  his  wife,  and  maundering  regrets  for  his  mar- 
riage. He  and  she  will  finally  perish  by  the  knife  of 
an  assassin,  a  dismissed  servant  and  suspected  spy,  Lo- 
renzo the  Piedmontese,  who  killed  himself  after  the 
double  murder.  He  and  she  will  lie  together  in  an 
English  grave,  somewhere  in  the  gray  St.  Pancras  re- 
gion. Could  there  be  a  more  dismal,  more  tragic  end- 
ing for  two  lives  that  had  begun  so  brightly? 


1789.  NECKER'S  PLAN.  549 


CHAPTER  XXXVIL 

DRIFTING. 

STILL  the  slow  debates  dragged  on;  still  Bailly  made 
his  unceasing,  unsuccessful  efforts  to  see  the  king;  still 
met  the  commissioners  in  conference.  On  June  3d  the 
nobles  wasted  time  in  profitless  and  purposeless  investi- 
gations into  the  custom  of  deciding  by  order  in  the 
most  distant  days.  They  made  a  brave  show  of  pedan- 
try in  citing  capitularies  of  Charlemagne  and  a  letter 
of  Hincmar,  "  De  Ordine  Palatii,"  in  discussing  the  ex- 
istence of  orders  among  the  Franks  of  the  time  of  Tac- 
itus, and  in  wrangling  over  the  term  "Commons"  as 
applied  to  the  Third  Estate.  In  this  apparent  dead-lock 
Necker  developed  a  plan,  and  produced  it  on  June  4th. 
He  proposed  that  each  order  should  verify  separately 
its  own  powers,  that  contested  points  should  be  brought 
before  the  commissioners  of  the  three  orders,  and  that 
in  any  case  of  final  disagreement  the  matter  should  be 
left  to  the  judgment  of  the  king,  a  judgment  without 
appeal.  On  June  5th  the  clergy  decided  to  accept  the 
Necker  proposal.  If  the  nobility  had  been  as  astute 
as  the  clergy,  and  had  acted  as  they  acted,  the  Third 
Estate  would  have  been  caught  in  a  very  ingenious 
trap.  But,  luckily  for  the  Third  Estate  and  the  cause 
it  represented,  the  nobles,  guided  by  such  spirits  as 
D'Antraigues,  Cazales,  D'Epremesnil,  and  their  kind, 
were  less  politic.  They  declined  to  accept  a  proposal 
fashioned,  had  they  but  been  wise  enough  to  know  it, 


550  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.         Cu.  XXXVII. 

entirely  in  their  interests;  declined  to  accept  it  except 
with  amendments  of  a  kind  which  the  Third  Estate  was 
not  likely  to  tolerate.  Indeed,  the  Third  Estate,  long 
tolerant,  was  growing  desperately  impatient.  On  June 
5th  an  indignant  deputy  proposed  boldly  what  no  doubt 
many  were  desiring,  that  the  Third  Estate  should  have 
done  with  temporizing  for  good  and  all,  and  should 
form  themselves  at  once  into  a  National  Assembly. 
Mirabeau  once  more  rose  to  the  situation,  dominated 
and  directed  the  fluctuant  Assembly.  All  the  efforts  of 
the  ministers,  he  declared,  had  been  directed  to  sowing 
the  seeds  of  division,  while  they  pretended  to  preach 
union.  Forced,  against  their  wills,  to  convoke  the 
States-General,  they  hoped,  by  dividing  them  and  set- 
ting them  against  each  other,  to  minimize  their  power 
and  to  reduce  them  to  the  necessity  of  accepting  the 
ministry  as  the  final  arbiter  of  their  differences.  They 
should  not  hide  from  themselves,  he  said,  that  the  veri- 
fication of  powers  prejudged  the  question  of  the  manner 
of  voting,  since  to  verify  the  powers  was  in  itself  to 
deliberate  upon  the  legality  or  illegality  of  those  same 
powers.  Since  it  was  the  same  question,  by  what  right 
could  any  tribunal  whatever  other  than  the  States-Gen- 
eral dare  to  decide  in  this  particular?  He  wound  up  by 
declaring  that  to  adopt  the  proposals  of  the  royal  com- 
missioners would  strike  at  the  rights  of  the  nation,  and 
wound  alike  justice  and  expediency.  It  would  paralyze 
with  the  chill  of  death  the  National  Assembly  before  it 
had  even  manifested  its  existence,  and  it  would  destroy 
the  last  hope  of  the  nation.  It  was  finally  decided,  by 
four  hundred  votes  to  twenty-six,  that  the  Third  Estate 
would  not  consider  the  ministerial  proposals  until  after 
the  close  of  the  conferences. 

On  June  5th  Bailly  had  announced  to  the  Third  Es- 


1789.  A  SPIRITED  RETORT.  551 

tate  that  he  had  been  unsuccessful  in  his  efforts  to  ob- 
tain an  audience  of  the  king  and  queen,  and  he  had 
proposed  to  the  Commons  that  they  should  resolve  to 
go  as  a  body  to  sprinkle  holy  water  upon  the  body  of 
the  dead  Dauphin.  This  proposal  was  carried  unani- 
mously. Now,  on  June  6th,  Bailly  was  able  to  an- 
nounce to  the  Third  Estate  that  the  king  had  at  last 
consented  to  receive  the  long -deferred  deputation — 
would,  in  fact,  receive  it  that  very  day.  Received  the 
deputation  accordingly  was,  though  only  to  the  num- 
ber of  twenty  members,  a  smaller  number  than  the  Com- 
mons had  originally  proposed  to  send.  The  Commons' 
deputation  was  composed  of  the  following  deputies : 
Bailly,  Redon,  Thouret,  Bouillote,  Chapelier,  Volney, 
Target,  D'Ambezieux,  Rabaud-Saint-fitienne,  De  Luze, 
Milscent,  Tronchet,  Ducellier,  Prevot,  Mounier,  Mira- 
beau,  Lebrun,  Legrand,  Aucler,  Descottes,  Mathieu  de 
Rondeville,  Pelisson.  The  twenty  were  solemnly  re- 
ceived by  the  afflicted  king.  The  antique  ceremonies 
of  abasement  which  the  Keeper  of  the  Seals  had  talked 
over  earlier  with  Bailly  were,  most  wisely,  not  insisted 
upon.  The  Keeper  of  the  Seals  had  suggested  to  Bailly 
that  it  certainly  was  the  ancient  usage  for  such  an  indi- 
vidual as  an  orator  of  the  Third  Estate  to  speak  to  his 
king  on  his  knees.  "  We  do  not  wish,  of  course,"  said 
the  Keeper  of  the  Seals,  "  to  insist  upon  an  old  ceremony 
which  might  wound  the  feelings  of  the  Third  Estate, 
but  still,  if  the  king  wished  it — "  "And  how  if  twen- 
ty-five millions  of  men  do  not  wish  it  ?"  Bailly  boldly 
interrupted,  after  which  no  more  was  heard  of  the  an- 
cient usage. 

Now,  at  last,  without  kneeling,  the  Commons'  deputa- 
tion got  into  the  royal  presence.  Now  the  bland,  weak 
face  of  the  king  could  survey,  among  those  twenty  men 


552  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.    .    CH.  XXXVII. 

who  trod  gravely  at  Bailly's  heels,  with  other  notable 
faces  the  face  most  notable  of  all,  and  probably  most 
distasteful  to  him  of  all,  the  face  of  Mirabeau.  In  that 
face,  no  doubt,  Louis  thought  he  saw  the  most  danger- 
ous enemy  of  the  monarchy ;  only  a  little  while  and 
that  face  shall  be  thought  of  as  belonging  to  the  best 
friend  of  the  monarchy.  While  such  speculations  as 
might  be  were  passing  through  the  muddled,  angry,  af- 
flicted royal  mind,  Dean  Bailly  gravely  read  the  long- 
prepared  address,  to  which  he  had  neatly  tacked  a  little 
condoling  sentence  about  the  poor  dead  Dauphin.  The 
king  then,  having  to  say  something,  said  as  little  as 
possible.  He  accepted  with  a  cold  satisfaction  the  ex- 
pressions of  devotion  and  attachment  of  the  Third  Es- 
tate. He  assured  them  that  all  the  orders  of  the  States- 
General  had  an  equal  claim  upon  his  goodness.  He 
finally,  with  an  undertone  of  menace,  advised  them, 
above  all  things,  to  second  promptly,  wisely,  and  peace- 
fully the  accomplishment  of  the  good  which  the  sover- 
eign so  anxiously  desired  to  do  for  his  people,  and 
which  the  people  no  less  anxiously  and  confidently  ex- 
pected from  him.  With  these  words  the  king  dismissed 
the  deputation,  convinced,  no  doubt,  that  in  uttering  the 
words  set  down  for  him  he  had  played  a  very  states- 
manlike part  indeed.  The  deputation  returned  imme- 
diately-to  the  Salle  des  Menus  to  give  an  account  of 
their  interview. 

That  June  6th  was  to  be  an  eventful  day  in  the  Com- 
mons' Chamber.  Bailly  and  his  twenty  colleagues  had 
scarcely  returned  from  the  royal  presence  when  a  depu- 
tation arrived  from  the  clergy  with  a  very  remarkable 
proposition.  The  clergy  had  been  busy  in  their  cham- 
ber that  same  morning.  Decoulmiers,  Cure  of  Abbe- 
court,  had  moved  the  hearts  of  all  his  hearers  by  a 


1789.  AN  INGENIOUS  TRAP.  553 

pathetic  harangue  on  the  poverty  of  the  people  and  the 
scarcity  of  grain.  Fired  by  a  somewhat  tardy  sympa- 
thy with  the  sufferings  of  the  poor,  the  clergy  resolved 
to  petition  the  king  to  order  the  strictest  investigation 
in  order  to  discover  the  monopolizers  of  the  corn  that 
belongs  to  the  country.  They  further  resolved  to  send 
a  deputation  to  the  Third  Estate,  calling  upon  the  Com- 
mons to  join  with  them  in  a  conference  having  for  its 
aim  and  object  the  alleviation  of  the  popular  suffering 
due  to  the  scarcity  of  food. 

Here  was  a  trap  with  a  vengeance,  and  one  of  the 
most  ingenious  kind.  The  prelate  who  held  up  in  the 
eyes  of  the  Third  Estate  and  the  thronged  benches  of 
spectators  a  horrible  hunch  of  black  bread,  and  asked 
them  with  a  tearful  voice  to  look  upon  the  food  of  the 
peasant,  had  calculated  very  skilfully  upon  the  result  of 
his  dramatic  appeal.  If  the  Assembly  yielded  to  the  ap- 
peal, and  took  action  of  the  kind  demanded,  it  would  by 
so  doing  practically  sanction  that  very  separation  of  the 
orders  against  which  it  had  striven  so  long  and  so  pa- 
tiently. If,  on  the  other  hand,  it  rejected  the  appeal 
now  made  to  it,  it  afforded  its  enemies  the  opportunity 
of  saying  that  it  set  a  technical  and  legal  question  far 
above  the  well-being  of  the  people  it  pretended  to  rep- 
resent. 

The  Third  Estate  parried  this  subtle  stroke  very 
skilfully.  Bailly,  as  dean,  replied  to  the  deputation  that 
the  ardent  wish  of  the  representatives  of  the  people  was 
to  come  to  the  people's  help,  and  that  in  the  action  of 
the  clergy  they  hailed  a  hope  of  that  speedy  union 
without  which  the  public  misfortunes  could  only  in- 
crease. As  soon  as  the  deputation  had  withdrawn,  car- 
rying with  them  this  craftily  qualified  reply,  a  vehe- 
ment debate  arose.  Populus,  a  comparatively  obscure 


554  THE  FRENCfl  REVOLUTION.         CH.  XXXVII. 

member,  a  lawyer  from  Bourg-en-Bresse,  declared  ener- 
getically that  the  action  of  the  clergy  was  merely  a 
most  insidious  political  move.  A  member  still  more 
obscure  followed  Populus  in  a  maiden  speech.  The  new 
speaker  was  almost  unknown  in  the  Assembly :  his  ap- 
pearance was  not  of  a  kind  to  attract.  A  face  deadly 
pale,  veins  of  a  greenish  hue,  insignificant  features,  a 
sinister  expression,  an  uneasy  unwillingness  to  look  any 
one  straight  in  the  face,  a  continual  and  painful  wink- 
ing of  the  eyes,  an  almost  childish  nervousness  which 
made  him  tremble  like  a  leaf  on  rising  to  address  the 
Assembly,  such  were  the  most  conspicuous  characteris- 
tics of  the  new  speaker.  But  if  the  appearance  of  the 
man  was  insignificant,  the  words  were  full  of  signifi- 
cance ;  if  the  expression  of  the  face  was  repellent,  the 
expression  of  his  thoughts  captivated  the  audience ;  if 
the  manner  was  nervous,  the  matter  was  bold,  daring, 
and  decisive. 

"  Let  the  clergy,"  he  said,  "  if  they  were  indeed  so  im- 
patient to  solace  the  sufferings  of  the  people,  come  into 
that  hall  and  ally  themselves  to  the  friends  of  the  peo- 
ple. Let  them  retard  no  longer  by  meaningless  delays 
the  duty  of  the  Third  Estate.  Let  them  no  longer  seek 
by  paltry  devices  to  turn  the  Commons  from  the  resolu- 
tions they  had  adopted.  Nay,  more,  and  better  still,  let 
them  remember  that  the  primitive  privileges,  the  an- 
cient canons  of  the  Church,  justify  the  sale  even  of  the 
sacred  vases  in  so  excellent  a  cause.  Let  them,  as  min- 
isters of  religion  and  worthy  imitators  of  their  great 
Master,  renounce  the  luxury  which  environs  them.  Let 
them  put  aside  that  pomp  which  is  only  an  insult  to 
poverty.  Let  them  return  to  the  modesty  of  their  ori- 
gin. Let  them  dismiss  the  stately  servants  who  escort 
them.  Let  them  sell  their  splendid  equipages  and  con- 


1789.  HOBESPIERftE).  555 

vert  this  vile  superfluity  into  food  for  the  poor."  This 
energetic  speech  was  received  with  a  general  murmur 
of  the  most  flattering  approval.  Every  one  was  eager 
to  know  who  the  young  orator  was  who  had  so  adroitly 
seized  upon  arguments  so  skilful ;  nobody  seemed  to  be 
aware  who  the  orator  was.  It  was  not  until  some  min- 
utes of  eager  inquiry  that  men  began  to  pass  from  mouth 
to  mouth,  through  the  body  of  the  hall  and  all  along 
the  galleries,  the  name  of  Robespierre.  The  young  Ar- 
ras lawyer  had  made  his  first  appeal  to  popular  favor, 
and  had  not  made  it  in  vain.  It  is  curious  to  note  that 
Robespierre  was  so  completely  unknown  at  this  time 
that  his  name  does  not  appear  in  the  columns  of  the 
Moniteur  which  records  the  debate  of  June  6th.  A  frag- 
ment of  his  speech  is  indeed  given,  but  it  is  set  down 
by  the  perplexed  reporter  or  recorder  to  a  mysterious 

and  meaningless  "  N ."   The  speech  is  not  mentioned 

at  all  in  Buchez  and  Roux'  "Histoire  Parlementaire," 
and  even  the  excellent  "Archives  Parlementaires"  only 
follow  the  Moniteur  in  according  it  to  a  nameless  speak- 
er. Fortunately,  however,  the  fact  is  recorded,  and  a 
fuller  summary  of  the  speech  given  by  E^ienne  Dumont, 
of  Geneva,  the  Protestant  pastor  who  was  the  friend  of 
Bentham,  of  Romilly,  and  of  Mirabeaiu  He  was  pres- 
ent at  the  sitting  of  the  6th  of  June,  and  described  the 
impression  it  produced  upon  its  hearers. 

Malouet  rose  in  support  of  the  motion  of  Populus, 
that  the  clergy  should  be  invited  at  once  to  join  the 
Third  Estate  in  the  Salle  des  Menus.  The  discussion 
was  interrupted  by  the  arrival  of  a  deputation  from 
the  nobles  informing  the  Third  Estate  of  the  deter- 
mination to  which  they  had  arrived  with  regard  to  the 
Necker  proposal.  The  Third  Estate  gravely  assured 
the  deputation  that  its  information  would  be  duly  con- 


556  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.          CH.  XXXVII. 

sidered,  whereupon  the  deputation  withdrew,  and  the 
debate  upon  the  proposal  of  the  clergy  continued.  It 
was  finally  decided  to  send  this  message  to  the  clergy : 
"  Swayed  by  the  same  duties  as  you,  touched  even  to 
tears  by  the  public  sorrows,  we  entreat  you,  we  conjure 
you  to  join  us  at  this  very  moment  in  the  common  hall, 
in  order  to  consider  the  means  of  ameliorating  those 
sorrows." 


1789.  A  MEMOHABLE  DATE.  557 


CHAPTER  XXXVIII. 

THE    TENTH    OF    JUNE. 

IN  all  constitutional  movements,  in  all  tentative  agi- 
tations, there  conies  a  critical  moment  when  the  irreso- 
lute becomes  resolute,  when  inertia  becomes  action,/ 
when  a  number  of  scattered  forces  become  homoge-( 
neous,  and  union  arises  out  of  chaos.  June  10,  1789, 
was  such  a  critical  moment  in  the  history  of  the  French 
Revolution.  Up  to  that  time,  if  we  anticipate  and  am- 
plify a  simile  of  Sieyes,  the  new  ship  of  state,  the  Tiers 
Etat,  had  been  rocking  meaninglessly  at  her  moorings, 
and  in  the  gathering  storm  there  seemed  every  prospect 
that  she  might  be  wrecked  while  riding  at  anchor  and 
actually  in  port.  But  with  June  10th  came  Sieyes 
and  his  simile.  "  Let  us  cut  the  cable,"  he  said,  "  it  is 
time."  And  he  proceeded  to  cut  the  cable,  and  set  the 
ship  free  for  her  famous  voyage  and  her  amazing  ship- 
wrecks, a  voyage  and  shipwrecks  which  that  adventur- 
ous constitutional  mariner  Sieyes  shall  survive  and  sor- 
row over. 

The  Third  Estate  had  fought  hard  for  the  true  rights 
of  the  States-General.  It  had  battled  for  the  common 
scrutiny  and  the  common  vote.  It  had  found  leagued 
against  it  the  overt  hostility  of  the  noble  order,  the 
covert  animosity  of  the  court,  the  vacillations  and 
chicanery  of  the  clerical  order.  The  conferences  had 
come  to  nothing.  The  Commons  were  face  to  face 
with  a  tremendous  alternative — either  to  yield  ignomin- 


558  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.        CH.  XXXVIII. 

iously  or  to  persevere  in  what  might  almost  seem  a 
desperate  course.  As  was  natural,  it  was  Mirabeau 
who  helped  to  decide  the  action  of  the  Third  Estate. 
Scarcely  had  the  Commons  assembled  on  June  10th  when 
he  rose  and  called  the  attention  of  the  Assembly  to  the 
grave  danger  involved  in  further  delay.  There  was,  he 
believed,  a  member  of  the  Third  Estate,  a  deputy  of  one 
of  the  Paris  divisions,  who  had  a  very  important  pro- 
posal to  make  to  the  Third  Estate,  and  he  solicited  the 
best  attention  of  the  Commons  to  that  proposal.  Nat- 
urally the  Commons,  who,  as  a  body,  were  beginning 
to  regard  Mirabeau  as  their  natural  leader,  were  only 
too  eager  to  listen  to  any  proposal  which  came  to  them 
thus  heralded.  Mirabeau  sat  down,  and  the  Abbe  Sie- 
yes arose.  This  was  Sieyes'  first  appearance  before  the 
Commons ;  this  was  Sieyes'  first  speech,  it  was  his  first 
decisive  step  in  public  life.  He  naturally  addressed  a 
favorable  audience.  His  pamphlet  was  in  every  man's 
mind,  in  every  man's  hand — that  famous  pamphlet  whose 
initial  question  was  in  every  man's  mouth  :  "  What  is 
the  Third  Estate?  Everything.  What  has  it  been 
till  now  in  the  body  politic?  Nothing."  The  priest 
against  his  will  who  had  so  long  abstained  from  preach- 
ing or  confessing,  who  had  devoted  his  hours  to  the 
study  of  philosophy  and  the  laws  of  applied  politics, 
was  well  commended  in  the  eyes  of  the  expectant  Com- 
mons ;  the  big  proposal  he  had  to  make  was  listened  to 
with  the  greatest  enthusiasm. 

In  brief,  this  proposal  was  that  the  first  two  orders 
should  be  immediately  summoned  to  join  the  Com- 
mons, that  they  should  be  informed  that  the  call  of  the 
constituencies  would  be  made  in  an  hour,  and  that  the 
members  of  either  of  the  orders  who  did  not  obey  the 
summons  would  be  condemned  by  default.  Here  was  a 


1789.  EVASIVE  REPLIES.  559 

serious,  a  daring  proposal.  It  fired  the  Assembly  with 
enthusiasm.  After  a  debate  prolonged  to  an  evening 
sitting  the  proposal  of  Sieves  was  accepted  with  some 
slight  modifications.  The  next  day,  June  llth,  being  a 
religious  holiday,  the  Third  Estate  did  not  meet,  but  we 
may  note,  significantly  enough,  that  a  hundred  cures  of 
the  clerical  chamber  assembled  together,  and  solemnly 
agreed  that,  without  waiting  for  the  decision  of  their 
body,  they  would  unite  with  the  Third  Estate  for  the 
common  verification  of  powers.  On  the  following  day, 
Friday,  June  12th,  the  Third  Estate  assembled,  and  pro- 
ceeded to  carry  into  effect  its  resolution  of  the  day  be- 
fore yesterday.  It  sent  two  deputations,  one  to  the  no- 
bility and  one  to  the  clergy,  calling  upon  them  to  join 
the  Third  Estate  in  the  common  hall,  and  proceed  to 
the  calling  of  the  constituencies  and  the  verification  of 
powers.  To  this  summons  the  clergy  responded,  with 
more  or  less  periphrase,  that  they  would  think  about  it. 
To  this  summons  the  nobles  in  their  turn  responded, 
also  with  more  or  less  periphrase,  that  they  would  think 
about  it.  The  reply  in  the  case  of  the  clergy  implied 
a  certain  amount  of  uncertainty.  The  nobles  were  not 
in  the  least  uncertain.  They  intended  to  adhere  to 
their  original  resolution. 

The  Third  Estate  occupied  itself  for  a  while  in  dis- 
cussing an  address  to  the  king.  A  proposal  of  Bar- 
nave's  carried  the  day  over  a  proposal  of  Malouet's, 
which  was  too  much  sugared  with  compliments  to  please 
the  taste  of  an  Assembly  that  was  rapidly  passing  out 
of  its  political  childhood.  Barnave  put  the  case  of  the 
Commons  with  great  strength  and  directness.  He  threw 
the  blame  of  the  defeated  project  of  conciliation  entire- 
ly upon  the  shoulders  of  the  nobility.  There  was  noth- 
ing left,  he  contended,  for  the  Commons  to  do  save  to 


560  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.        CH.  XXXVIII. 

get  to  work  as  speedily  as  possible  without  losing  any 
further  time  in  vain  discussions.  He  wound  up  by  re- 
questing the  king  with  a  polite  firmness  to  allow  the 
dean  of  the  Third  Estate  an  interview  with  his  sacred 
person,  in  order  that  an  account  of  the  determination 
and  the  action  of  the  Commons  might  be  submitted  to 
him.  This  address  disposed  of,  the  Third  Estate  be- 
gan to  set  to  work  in  good  earnest.  Upon  the  motion 
of  one  of  the  Paris  deputies,  Desmeuniers,  a  man  of  let- 
ters, who  had  at  one  time  been  private  secretary  to  the 
Count  de  Provence,  it  was  resolved  to  proceed  at  once 
to  calling  over  the  roll  of  the  constituencies.  Each 
deputy,  as  his  constituency  was  called,  was  to  submit 
his  powers  to  the  bureau  to  be  registered.  The  ma- 
chinery was  fairly  in  motion  at  last ;  but  on  this  first 
day  no  single  representative  of  the  two  higher  orders 
put  in  an  appearance  at  the  Salle  des  Menus.  The 
hundred  clergy  were  evidently  held  in  check. 

The  political  machine  was  now  in  working  order.  It 
was,  in  fact,  actually  working.  It  only  needed  that  im- 
portant appendage  of  all  machines,  political  or  other — 
a  name.  On  June  15th  Sieyes  proposed  that  it  should 
be  styled  the  Assembly  of  Known  and  Verified  Represen- 
tatives of  the  French  Nation.  Mirabeau  proposed,  sim- 
ply, Representatives  of  the  French  People.  Mounier  pro- 
posed, "  Majority  deliberating  in  the  absence  of  the  Mi- 
nority." A  deputy  from  Vendome,  to  whom  nobody  paid 
any  attention,  suggested  that  the  Assembly  should  consist 
of  "Representatives  of  their  Constituents."  Pison  du 
Galland,  a  well-esteemed  Grenoble  lawyer,  whom  des- 
tiny will  preserve  for  a  peaceful  and  dignified  ending 
as  a  judge  at  Grenoble,  had  a  notion  that  the  title  of 
all  titles  was  "Active  and  Legitimate  Assembly  of  the 
Representatives  of  the  French  Nation."  Legrand  struck 


1789.  AN  EXCITED  CITIZEN.  561 

well  in  the  centre  of  the  speculative  target  with  the 
happy  and  simple  suggestion  that  they  should  call  them- 
selves "National  Assembly."  Supplementary  to  this 
question  of  the  nomenclature,  and  really  more  impor- 
tant, was  the  question  of  the  authority  of  the  body. 
Should  the  king  have  a  veto  or  not  ?  Mirabeau  protest- 
ed passionately  in  favor  of  a  royal  right  of  veto :  "  I 
believe  the  veto  of  the  king  to  be  so  necessary  that  I 
would  rather  live  in .  Constantinople  than  in  France  if 
he  had  it  not."  Camus,  the  Aristotelian  scholar,  the 
learned  in  ecclesiastical  law,  pertinently  asked  if  any 
royal  veto  could  prevent  the  Assembly  from  being  what 
it  was. 

The  protracted  debate  dragged  on  till  the  midnight 
of  June  16th.  The  later  scenes  were  stormy.  The  vast 
majority  of  the  Assembly  were  in  favor  of  coming  to  a 
vote  at  once,  of  constituting  themselves  a  National  As- 
sembly before  the  next  morning  dawned.  But  a  minoi-- 
ity  was  opposed — a  very  decided,  persistent  minority — 
some  hundred  deputies  in  all,  headed  by  prudent  Ma- 
louet,  who  fought  vigorously  against  an  immediate  de- 
cision. With  cries,  protests,  noisy  interruptions  of  all 
kinds,  they  prevented  the  appeal  by  name,  much  to  the 
indignation  of  the  spectators.  One  of  these  was  so  ex- 
cited by  the  scene  that  he  ran  from  his  place  to  show 
his  disapproval  of  the  action  of  Malouet  by  taking  him 
angrily  by  the  collar.  The  fiery  citizen  made  his  escape 
successfully  after  this  astonishing  breach  of  parliamen- 
tary decorum.  In  the  midst  of  all  the  hubbub  the  As- 
sembly as  a  body  preserved  its  dignity.  Strongly  pa- 
tient, it  was  content  to  wait  until  the  warring  minority 
had  worn  itself  out  in  clamorous  interruptions.  At  mid- 
night, when  the  tumult  was  somewhat  abated,  when 
three  of  the  deputies  had  withdrawn,  when  the  com- 
L— 36 


562  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.         CH.  XXXVIII. 

posed  majority  bad  found  itself  in  tranquil  possession 
of  the  hall,  Gautier  de  Biauzat  urged  that  so  important 
a  resolution  should  be  carried  in  the  full  light  of  day, 
under  the  eyes  of  the  whole  nation.  Biauzat  was  a  sen- 
sible man,  a  moderate  liberal,  a  lawyer  at  Clermont- 
Ferrand,  for  whom  fate  reserved  a  peaceful  ending  as  a 
councillor  of  state  in  the  year  of  Waterloo.  "  I  am 
ready,"  he  declared,  "  to  vote  that  we  should  constitute 
ourselves  a  National  Assembly,  but  this  is  not  the  hour. 
To-morrow  I  will  be  ready  to  sign  that  vote  with  my 
blood."  His  suggestion  was  accepted.  The  Third  Es- 
tate, after  its  parliamentary  baptism  of  fire,  rose  at  one 
in  the  morning. 


1789.  A  LETTER  FROM   THE   KING.  553 


CHAPTER   XXXIX. 

THE     SEVENTEENTH     OF     JUNE. 

ON  the  morning  of  June  17th  the  Third  Estate  met 
again  for  the  last  time  as  a  separate,  disorganized  order. 
A  vast  throng  of  spectators  lined  the  hall  to  witness  the 
solemn  celebration,  the  thought  of  which  was  in  all 
men's  minds,  comment  on  which  was  in  all  men's 
mouths.  For  a  moment,  indeed,  it  seemed  as  if  the 
daring  deed  would  be  again  delayed.  A  message  came 
to  Bailly  summoning  him  to  the  Chancellery  to  receive 
a  letter  from  the  king.  The  royal  letter  was  a  warning 
to  the  audacious  Third  Estate,  reminding  it  that  it 
could  do  nothing  without  the  association  of  the  other 
orders.  Such  a  letter  at  such  a  moment  might  have  se- 
riously interfered  with  the  determination  arrived  at. 
The  hundred  malcontents  might  feel  themselves  stimu- 
lated to  fresh  efforts  in  the  direction  of  delay,  the  less 
enthusiastic  members  of  the  majority  might  be  either 
chilled  or  alarmed  into  inaction.  Under  the  circum- 
stances, the  Assembly  acted  wisely  in  avoiding  all  possi- 
ble dissension  by  adjourning  the  consideration  of  the 
royal  letter,  and  by  forbidding  its  dean  to  leave  the  hall 
until  the  conclusion  of  the  sitting.  By  a  vote  of  four 
hundred  and  ninety-one  to  ninety — by  a  clear  majority, 
that  is  to  say,  of  more  than  four  hundred  members — the 
amended  motion  of  Sieyes  was  carried,  and  the  chaotic 
Third  Estate  was  metamorphosed  into  the  ordered  and 
organized  "National  Assembly." 


564  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIX. 

It  is  well,  it  is  even  essential  here,  to  read  and  to  re- 
cord the  words  in  which  the  newly  created  Assembly, 
through  the  mouth  of  Sieyes,  formulated  its  right  to  ex- 
istence : 

"  The  Assembly,  deliberating  after  the  verification  of 
powers,  recognizes  that  it  is  already  composed  of  repre- 
sentatives directly  delegated  by  at  least  ninety-six  hun- 
dredths  of  the  nation.  Such  a  large  body  of  delegated 
authority  cannot  rest  idle  in  consequence  of  the  absence 
of  the  deputies  of  certain  constituencies  or  of  certain 
classes  of  citizens,  for  the  absent  who  have  been  duly 
summoned  cannot  prevent  those  who  are  present  from 
exercising  the  fulness  of  their  rights,  more  especially 
when  the  exercise  of  those  rights  has  become  a  pressing 
and  imperious  duty. 

"Moreover,  since  it  belongs  to  only  duly  verified  rep- 
resentatives to  carry  out  the  popular  wish,  and  since  all 
the  verified  representatives  ought  to  be  in  this  Assembly, 
it  is  further  indispensable  to  conclude  that  to  it,  and  to 
it  alone,  belongs  the  right  to  interpret  and  to  represent 
the  general  will  of  the  nation. 

"  There  cannot  exist  between  the  Throne  and  the  As- 
sembly any  veto,  any  negative  power. 

"The  Assembly  declares,  then,  that  the  common  work 
of  national  restoration  can  and  should  be  begun  with- 
out delay  by  the  deputies  present,  and  thatjthey  ought 
to  carry  it  on  without  interruption  as  without  obstacle. 

"  The  denomination  of  '  National  Assembly '  is  the 
only  title  that  belongs  to  the  Assembly  in  the  existing 
condition  of  things,  whether  because  the  members  who 
compose  it  are  the  only  representatives  legitimately 
and  publicly  known  and  verified,  whether  because  they 
are  delegated  by  wellnigh  the  entire  sum  of  the  nation, 
or  whether,  finally,  because,  the  representation  being 


1789.  A  FAR-REACHING  ECHO.  565 

one  and  indivisible,  no  deputy,  in  whatever  order  or 
class  he  may  be  chosen,  has  the  right  to  exercise  his 
functions  separately  from  this  Assembly. 

"  The  Assembly  will  never  lose  its  hope  of  uniting  in 
its  bosom  all  the  deputies  who  are  absent  to-day;  it 
will  not  cease  to  call  upon  them  to  fulfil  the  obligation 
imposed  upon  them  of  aiding  in  the  work  of  the  States- 
General.  The  Assembly  declares  in  advance  that  at 
whatever  moment  the  absent  deputies  may  present 
themselves  in  the  session  that  is  about  to  open,  it  will 
rejoice  to  receive  them,  and  to  allow  them,  after  due 
verification  of  their  powers,  to  share  in  the  great  labors 
which  should  bring  about  the  regeneration  of  France. 

"  The  National  Assembly  resolves  that  the  reasons 
for  this  present  resolution  shall  be  at  once  set  forth  in 
order  that  they  may  be  presented  to  the  king  and  to 
the  nation." 

The  Assembly,  having  thus  formulated  its  act  of  birth, 
proceeded  to  swear  a  solemn  oath :  "  We  swear  and 
promise  to  fulfil  with  zeal  and  fidelity  the  duties  which 
devolve  upon  us."  This  oath,  sworn  by  some  six  hun- 
dred deputies  in  the  presence  of  some  four  thousand  spec- 
tators, might  well  "excite  the  greatest  emotion,  and 
form  an  august  and  imposing  ceremony."  The  echo  of 
that  oath  would  ring  very  unpleasantly  in  the  ears  of  the 
king,  still  more  unpleasantly  in  the  ears  of  the  queen, 
most  unpleasantly  of  all  in  the  ears  of  the  Polignac  fac- 
tion and  the  intriguers  of  the  Bull's  Eye.  Its  echo,  too, 
would  reach  to  those  two  chambers  where  the  clergy 
and  the  nobility  were  so  busily  engaged  in  doing  noth- 
ing, and  would  arouse  most  unpleasant  emotions  there 
— envy,  hatred,  malice,  and  all  uncharitableness,  but  es- 
pecially and  most  unpleasantly  a  sense  of  fear.  The 
echo  of  that  oath  would  resound  all  over  France,  and 


566  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.          CH.  XXXIX. 

tell  the  long-silent,  long-suffering  millions  that  they  need 
suffer  and  be  silent  no  longer,  for  they  have  found  a 
voice  at  last,  and  a  loud  one,  that  princes  and  prelates  and 
even  kings  must  perforce  listen  to.  The  fame  of  this 
great  oath  has  been  much  obscured  by  the  yet  greater 
fame  and  moment  of  another  oath,  which  has  yet  to  be 
taken,  very  soon,  under  conditions  even  more  urgent, 
more  magnificently  dramatic  than  these.  But  the  mem- 
ory of  that  solemn  conjuration  should  be  kept  green, 
for  it  inaugurated  the  Revolution. 

In  order  to  prove  their  existence  as  an  organized  and 
constitutional  body,  the  newly  born  National  Assembly 
proceeded  at  once  to  certain  -enactments.  It  immedi- 
ately took  over  to  itself  the  right  of  taxation.  The  ex- 
isting taxes  it  declared  to  be  illegally  levied,  as  they  had 
not  been  agreed  to  or  accepted  by  the  nation.  Never- 
theless, and  for  the  moment,  it  consented  to  ratify  their 
levy  provisionally,  until — and  here  came  in  a  very  happy 
diplomatic  stroke — "  the  first  separation  of  this  Assem- 
bly, from  whatever  cause  it  may  arrive."  "  After  that 
day  the  National  Assembly  orders  and  decrees  that  all 
levy  of  imposts  and  taxes  of  all  kinds,  which  shall  not 
have  been  duly,  formally,  and  freely  accorded  by  the 
Assembly,  shall  cease  entirely  in  all  the  provinces  of  the 
realm."  By  this  daring  act  the  Assembly  guarded  itself 
against  some  despotic  stroke,  by  leaving  behind  it  a 
freed  nation,  whose  duty  and  whose  interest  it  would 
be  to  carry  on  the  work.  To  provide  against  possible 
bankruptcy,  it  placed  the  national  creditors  under  the 
safeguard  and  the  honor  and  loyalty  of  the  French  na- 
tion. It  further  announced  its  immediate  intention  of 
dealing  with  the  dearth  and  the  public  misery.  The 
Assembly  having  thus  established  its  rights,  and  entered 
thus  upon  the  exercise  of  those  rights,  sent  Camus  off 


1789.  ORDER  OUT  OF  CHAOS.  567 

post-haste  to  printer  Baudouin  at  Paris,  to  have  these 
important  resolutions  printed  without  delay,  and  scat- 
tered broadcast  throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of 
France.  The  National  Assembly  meant  business. 

So  from  the  most  chaotic  beginnings  the  formless, 
powerless,  meaningless  Third  Estate  had  grown  into  a 
great  constitutional  assembly,  claiming  the  right  to  ad- 
minister the  affairs  of  the  State.  During  all  those  weary 
weeks  of  waiting,  of  delay,  of  inertia,  the  Assembly  had 
been  slowly  taking  shape,  slowly,  surely  growing  into 
being,  as  in  the  hands  of  the  Indian  juggler  the  little 
seed  he  plants  in  the  soil  grows  on  miraculously  into  the 
sapling  and  the  tree.  The  spectators  hardly  perceive 
the  process  of  growth  between  the  sowing  of  the  seed 
and  the  existence  of  the  tree;  but  the  process  has  taken 
place  ;  the  seed  has  become  the  sturdy  sapling ;  the 
Third  Estate  has  become  the  National  Assembly.  A 
modern  poetess  says  of  a  modern  diplomatist,  "  that  he 
held  his  Piedmont  up  to  the  light,  and  she  suddenly 
smiled  and  was  Italy."  In  something  of  the  same  way 
it  might  be  said  of  Sieyes,  that  he  held  the  Third  Estate 
up  to  the  light,  and  it  suddenly  smiled  and  was  France. 
It  was  France,  indeed,  that  that  National  Assembly  rep- 
resented. For  all  intents  and  purposes  of  government, 
and  especially  for  the  great  intent  and  purpose  of  re- 
generation of  the  country,  that  National  Assembly  was 
France.  To  this  amazing,  most  perplexing  conclusion 
had  Necker's  easily  manipulated  Third  Estate  arrived, 
much  to  Necker's  disappointment,  and  even  disgust. 

The  name  of  the  king  in  the  Sieyes  manifesto  had 
evoked  loud  and  enthusiastic  cries  of  "Long  live  the 
King!"  in  the  morning  sitting  of  June  17th.  At  the 
evening  sitting  the  king's  name  came  again  before  the 
Assembly  under  less  congratulatory  conditions.  That 


568  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIX. 

missive  from  the  monarch  which  the  Assembly  had  not 
in  the  morning  allowed  Bailly  to  go  for  had  now  come 
into  Bailly's  hands,  and  was  by  him  now  read  to  the 
Assembly.  It  was  addressed  to  "M.  Bailly,  Dean  of 
the  Order  of  the  Third  Estate,"  and  the  body  of  the 
letter  was  quite  as  ill-advised  and  foolish  as  its  address. 
After  protesting  plaintively  against  the  use  of  the  term 
'  privileged  classes,"  as  applied  by  the  Third  Estate  to 
the  two  other  orders,  it  went  on  to  say  that  "  the  re- 
serve which  the  order  of  nobility  had  shown  in  its  ac- 
quiescence in  the  overtures  made  on  my  part  should 
not  have  prevented  the  Third  Estate  from  giving  an 
example  of  deference ;"  and  wound  up  by  assuring  the 
Third  Estate  that  the  more  confidence  and  attachment 
the  Third  Estate  displayed  towards  their  king,  the 
better  they  would  represent  the  feeling  of  the  people, 
whom  the  king  loved,  and  by  whom  it  was  his  happi- 
ness to  be  beloved.  The  Assembly  took  the  letter  very 
coolly.  Unkingly  maunderings  of  that  kind  were  not 
likely  to  delay  the  onward  course  of  the  new  constitu- 
tional body.  Indeed,  at  that  moment  the  constitutional 
body  proceeded  to  discuss  with  great  gravity  an  impor- 
tant question  concerning  the  physical  body.  Learned 
Dr.  Guillotin,  of  Paris,  was  much  concerned  in  his  med- 
ical mind  by  the  condition  of  his  colleagues  in  the  Na- 
tional Assembly.  It  seemed  to  him  that  the  air  of  a 
hall  breathed,  exhaled,  and  inhaled  by  some  three  thou- 
sand persons  could  not  possibly  be  otherwise  than  bad 
for  his  brother-deputies.  He  thought  further  that  the 
seats  were  too  closely  crowded  together  for  either 
health  or  comfort;  moreover,  the  seats,  such  as  they 
were,  were  portentously  hard  and  unyielding  for  ses- 
sions of  twelve  to  fourteen  hours.  He  earnestly  sug- 
gested that  they  should  be  forthwith  provided  with 


1789.  AN  INTERESTING  SPECTACLE. 

cushions.  We  of  a  later  time  associate  the  name  of 
learned  Dr.  Guillotin  more  with  man's  thinking  appa- 
ratus than  with  man's  sitting  apparatus.  It  is  gratify- 
ing to  discover  that  the  mind  which  devoted  itself  to 
the  best  means  of  removing  the  human  head  could  also 
devote  itself  to  the  physical  well-being  of  the  other  ex- 
tremity. A  grateful  Assembly  hailed  with  enthusiasm 
the  suggestions  of  their  scientific  colleague,  and  prompt- 
ly requested  him  to  preside  over  all  the  necessary  ar- 
rangements for  the  ventilation  of  the  hall,  the  better  ar- 
rangement of  the  benches,  and  the  due  cushioning.  All 
of  which  good  Dr.  Guillotin  would  no  doubt  have  been 
delighted  to  do,  if  only  time  and  fate  had  permitted. 
But  there  were  interruptions,  interruptions  of  the  most 
unforeseen  kind,  waiting  in  the  immediate  future  to  in- 
terfere with  the  excellent  sanitary  intentions  of  Dr. 
Guillotin. 

Arthur  Young  has  recorded  his  experience  of  the 
Assembly  on  what  he  happily  calls  the  "rich  day"  of 
the  15th  of  June.  "  We  went  immediately,"  he  says, 
"  to  the  hall  of  the  States  to  secure  good  seats  in  the 
gallery  ;  we  found  some  deputies  already  there,  and  a 
pretty  numerous  audience  collected.  The  room  is  too 
large  ;  none  but  stentorian  lungs  or  the  finest,  clearest 
voices  can  be  heard.  However,  the  very  size  of  the 
apartment,  which  admits  two  thousand  people,  gave  a 
dignity  to  the  scene.  It  was  indeed  an  interesting  one. 
The  spectacle  of  the  representatives  of  twenty-five  mill- 
ions of  people,  just  merging  from  the  evils  of  two  hun- 
dred years  of  arbitrary  power,  and  rising  to  the  bless- 
ings of  a  freer  Constitution,  assembled  with  open  doors 
under  the  eye  of  the  public,  was  framed  to  call  into 
animated  feelings  every  latent  spark,  every  emotion  of 
a  liberal  bosom.  ...  In  regard  to  their  general  method 


5VO  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XXXIX. 

of  proceeding,  there  are  two  circumstances  in  which 
they  are  very  deficient :  the  spectators  in  the  galleries 
are  allowed  to  interfere  in  the  debates  by  clapping  their 
hands,  and  other  noisy  expressions  of  approbation:  this 
is  grossly  indecent ;  it  is  also  dangerous  ;  for  if  they  are 
permitted  to  express  approbation,  they  are,  by  parity  of 
reason,  allowed  expressions  of  dissent ;  and  they  may 
hiss  as  well  as  clap  ;  which,  it  is  said,  they  have  some- 
times done :  this  would  be  to  overrule  the  debate  and 
influence  the  deliberations.  Another  circumstance  is 
the  want  of  order  among  themselves ;  more  than  once 
to-day  there  were  a  hundred  members  on  their  legs  at  a 
time,  and  M.  Bailly  absolutely  without  power  to  keep 
order."  Those  words  of  Arthur  Young's,  which  paint 
so  vivid  a  picture  of  that  new-born  turbulent  Assembly, 
have  in  them  a  kind  of  allegory.  All  those  excited 
deputies,  so  vehemently  striving  to  be  heard  at  once, 
were  typical  of  the  conflicting  theories  of  national  re- 
generation that  came  into  being  with  the  dawn  of  po- 
litical liberty.  Those  crowded  benches  where  the  pub- 
lic sat  grimly  approving  or  grimly  disapproving,  had  a 
significance  beyond  what  Arthur  Young  discerned.  And 
that  description  of  Bailly,  "  absolutely  without  power 
to  keep  order,"  seems  to  be  written  in  words  surcharged 
with  prophecy. 


1789.  THE   QUEEN  HAS   HER  WAY. 


CHAPTER    XL. 

TENNIS. 

ON  Friday,  June  19,  1789,  the  newly  created  National 
Assembly  sought  rest  from  its  labors  in  the  serene  be- 
lief that  it  was  the  ruling  power  in  France.  That  same 
night  the  most  desperate  stroke  was  resolved  upon  by 
its  enemies.  The  king  was  away  at  Marly,  oscillating 
feebly  between  the  imperious  counsels  of  the  queen  and 
the  prudent  commonplaces  of  Necker.  At  Versailles, 
where  the  popular  passion  stirred  even  the  courtly  air, 
Necker  had  more  power.  He  could  command  from  the 
king  a  respectful  if  bored  attention.  The  best  to  be 
said  for  Necker's  prudent  commonplaces,  and  indeed  it 
is  saying  much,  is  that  attention  to  them  might  have 
put  off  the  evil  day  a  little  longer.  But  at  Marly  the 
queen  had  it  her  own  way.  The  Polignac  influence,  the 
influence  of  the  pitiful  blood-princes,  the  influence  of 
all  the  evil  and  all  the  imbecile  counsellors  who  guided 
or  who  followed  the  queen,  were  able  to  bear  upon 
the  weak  king  with  irresistible  force.  The  courtly  talk 
was  bloody.  The  insolent  National  Assembly  must  be 
crushed  into  the  earth  from  which  it  sprang.  If  Ver- 
sailles, if  Paris  protested,  were  there  not  troops,  were 
there  not  foreign  mercenaries,  were  there  not  cannon  ? 

O  * 

Let  a  gallant  king  hold  his  own  though  he  slaughter  half 
his  citizens.  But  the  king,  if  he  was  not  of  the  stuff  of 
which  kings  are  well  made,  was  not  of  the  stuff  out  of 
which  scoundrels  are  well  made  either.  He  had  not  the 


672  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  OH.  XL 

wit  to  be  wise  and  follow  Necker  or  do  better  than 
Necker.  He  had  not  the  will  to  be  cruel  with  his  court, 
and  to  choke  democracy  with  its  own  blood.  He  adopt- 
ed a  kind  of  despairing,  ridiculous,  middle  course.  He 
would  blow  neither  hot  nor  cold ;  he  did,  perhaps,  the 
very  most  foolish  thing  that  under  the  conditions  he 
possibly  could  have  done.  If  he  did  not  suppress  the 
National  Assembly  out  of  hand,  at  least  he  would  pre- 
vent it  from  meeting  until  the  royal  session  of  the  com- 
ing Monday.  This  brave  act  was  to  have  two  great 
consequences :  It  was  to  humiliate  and  belittle  the  over- 
weening Third  Estate.  It  was  to  prevent  the  clergy 
from  uniting  with  the  Third  Estate,  as  the  majority  of 
them  seemed  now  ominously  inclined  to  do. 

On  the  night  of  June  19th  the  king  went  through  the 
process  which  he  called  making  up  his  mind.  On  the 
morning  of  the  next  day,  in  the  clear  daylight  of  six 
o'clock  on  that  summer  morning,  June  20, 1789,Versailles 
was  placarded  with  the  announcement  of  the  royal  ses- 
sion for  Monday,  and  the  closing  of  the  Salle  des  Menus 
for  necessary  preparations  until  that  date.  To  Bailly 
came  an  uncourteous  letter  from  Master  of  Ceremonies 
de  Breze — uncourteous  inasmuch  as  it  should  have  been 
written  by  the  king,  and  not  by  De  Breze — informing 
him  of  the  shutting  that  had  taken  place,  and  the  sitting 
that  was  yet  to  take  place.  Bailly,  in  the  face  of  this 
astonishing  news,  displayed  an  unconquerable  coolness, 
an  unconquerable  dignity.  When  the  hands  of  his  clock 
neared  the  appointed  hour  of  eight,  he  made  his  way 
towards  the  Salle  des  Menus,  as  if  nothing  had  happen- 
ed, or  could  happen,  to  hinder  the  triumphant  course  of 
the  National  Assembly.  It  was  not  a  pleasant  morning 
even  for  a  man  speeding  to  an  agi'eeable  appointment. 
It  drizzled  depressingly  with  a  fine  persistent  rain:  the 


1789.      CHILLING  RAIN,  MORE  CUILLIXG  BAYONETS.       573 

sky  was  gray,  and  most  unsummerlike  ;  it  seemed  as 
if  the  very  elements  were  of  the  courtly  faction,  and 
frowned  disapproval  upon  the  Third  Estate.  Under 
that  dismal  sky,  through  that  depressing  rain,  Bailly 
and  a  swelling  concourse  of  attendant  colleagues  pick- 
ed their  way  along  the  muddy  streets  to  the  Salle  des 
Menus.  At  the  Salle  des  Menus  Bailly  made  as  if  he 
would  enter  as  usual,  but  he  was  instantly  stopped  by 
the  sentinels  on  guard.  Then  ensued  a  colloquy  be- 
tween Bailty  and  the  officer  in  command,  while  the  at- 
tendant deputies  hung  about  in  groups,  and  sheltered 
themselves,  those  who  were  most  prudent,  under  drip- 
ping umbrellas.  The  officer  in  command  was  reasonably 
polite,  but  absolutely  peremptory  in  his  refusal.  Bailly 
urged  with  all  the  eloquence  at  his  command  that  the 
sitting  of  the  National  Assembly  had  been  convened, 
and  that  the  king  had  no  right  to  intervene.  The  offi- 
cer only  shook  his  head  and  pleaded  his  orders.  Some 
of  the  younger  deputies  in  their  irritation  talked  from 
under  their  umbrellas  of  forcing  their  way  into  the  hall. 
The  officer  replied  to  such  menaces  by  an  order  to  fix 
bayonets,  more  chilling  than  the  rain.  What  was  to  be 
done  ?  one  deputy  asked  of  another,  as  they  stood  there 
on  the  sloppy  pavement,  and  peered  into  each  other's 
faces,  pale  under  the  protection  of  the  damp  umbrellas. 
It  is  hard  to  be  heroic  under  an  umbrella ;  it  is  hard 
for  the  wet  civilian  to  feel  heroic  in  the  face  of  a  taci- 
turn soldiery  with  fixed  bayonets  and  no  respect  for  per- 
sons. Yet  those  deputies  wished  to  be  heroic,  aud  were 
in  fact  heroic.  While  Bailly  and  one  or  two  others 
were  permitted  as  a  special  favor  to  enter  the  Salle  des 
Menus  and  collect  the  papers  of  the  National  Assem- 
bly, the  indignant  deputies,  in  the  midst  of  a  no  less  in- 
dignant populace,  discussed,  on  the  Paris  Avenue,  all 


574  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL. 

manner  of  proposals.  Some  were  all  for  hurrying  off  to 
Marly,  and  holding  their  Assembly  under  the  very  win- 
dows of  the  offending  king.  Others  were  for  going  to 
Paris,  a  suggestion  which  met  with  much  popular  en- 
thusiasm, and  which  would  have  antedated  the  Revolu- 
tion by  some  four  weeks.  Suddenly,  ingenious  Dr. 
Guillotin,  ever  a  man  of  an  alert,  inventive  mind,  said 
his  say.  Was  there  not,  he  asked,  a  certain  old  tennis- 
court  in  Versailles  large  enough  to  offer  accommoda- 
tion, and,  considering  the  weather,  agreeable  shelter  for 
a  considerable  body  of  people  ?  Why  should  they  not 
proceed  in  a  body  to  this  tennis-court,  and  hold  their 
menaced  meeting  there?  No  sooner  said  than  done.  Dr. 
Guillotin  has  more  than  one  reason  for  being  remem- 
bered by  history. 

Priests  of  the  historic  muse  might  well  be  pardoned 
for  permitting  themselves  a  certain  hyperbolic  passion, 
a  certain  lighting  up  and  letting  off  of  verbal  fireworks 
over  that  marvellous  session  of  the  tennis-court.  To  that 
ancient,  tattered,  dilapidated  tennis-court,  where  princes 
had  played  ball  unheeded  up  to  yesterday,  where  cheap- 
ly audacious,  imbecile  princes  should  feign  a  desire  to 
play  ball  to-morrow,  to  that  dusty  paradise  of  nets  and 
rackets  the  National  Assembly  trooped,  spurred  by  in- 
dignation, by  need  of  shelter,  by  the  advice  of  ingenious 
Dr.  Guillotin.  One  member  who  was  in  bad  health  had 
to  be  carried  in  arms,  and  lifted  about  in  a  chair  inside 
the  court.  Bailly  came,  still  cool,  still  dignified,  convoy- 
ing his  rescued  papers.  His  immediate  friends  ranked 
about  him,  encouraging  and  deriving  courage.  Escort- 
ing the  deputies  and  their  dean  came  their  masters,  the 
attendant  people,  furious  with  the  fury  of  awakened, 
suddenly  slighted  democracy,  and  bearing,  as  on  stormy 
waters,  the  National  Assembly  to  its  haven  and  its  fate. 


1789.  A  FAMOUS  TENNIS  COURT.  575 

A  few  moments  more,  and  the  tennis-court,  whose  dis- 
mal solitude  had  echoed  unheeded  that  day-dawn,  was 
choked  with  a  mass  of  men  who  were  making  a  revo- 
lution. 

Many  pictures  have  preserved  for  the  curious  eyes  of 
later  generations  the  exterior  and  interior  aspect  of  that 
tennis-court.  We  can  see  the  indignant  deputies  en- 
tering amid  enthusiasm  by  the  lofty  door,  surmounted 
by  a  kind  of  scroll  or  scutcheon,  and  framed  in  high  flat 
pillars  terminating  in  an  arch  that  is  merely  decorat- 
ive. We  can  see  them  again  inside  the  court,  with  its 
walls  painted  black,  in  order  that  the  balls  may  be  seen 
more  distinctly  against  them;  with  one  wall  lower  than 
the  rest,  from  which  sprang  pillars  to  support  the  roof. 
Here  the  open  space  gave  light  and  air  to  the  court; 
here,  too,  nets  hung  to  prevent  the  balls  from  escaping. 
Round  three  sides  of  the  court,  about  midway  up  the 
wall,  projected  a  kind  of  penthouse  roof  structure  which 
has  its  part  in  the  "  pastime  of  princes."  There  were  a 
few  wretched  benches  scattered  here  and  there.  With 
some  difficulty  a  table  was  procured,  and  a  commodious 
chair  for  Bailly,  which,  however,  he  declined  to  use.  It 
was  not  for  the  Dean  of  the  National  Assembly,  he  ar- 
gued, to  sit  while  the  members  of  the  National  Assem- 
bly stood. 

"  Ubi  bene,  ibi  patria."  Wherever  the  delegates  of 
the  people  were  gathered  together,  there  was  the  Na- 
tional Assembly,  whether  it  were  in  the  golden  splendor 
of  the  Salle  des  Menus  or  the  naked  austerity  of  this 
tennis-court.  Bailly,  with  his  clerks  and  papers,  en- 
shrined himself  at  a  table,  persistently  cool  and  digni- 
fied. The  assembled  deputies  thronged  about  him,  all 
their  various  temperaments  displaying  themselves  freely 
under  the  touchstone  of  that  tremendous  hour.  Mounier 


570  T1IE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XL. 

was  the  fortunate  man  who  made  himself  the  mouth- 
piece of  the  hour.  He  proposed  to  the  fluctuant  Assem- 
bly that  they  should  adopt  by  oath  the  declaration 
that  wherever  it  might  be  forced  to  unite,  there  was  the 
National  Assembly,  that  nothing  could  prevent  it  from 
continuing  its  deliberations,  and  that  it  should  never  sep- 
arate until  the  completion  and  establishment  of  the  Con- 
stitution. Such  was  the  oath  that  Mounier  proposed. 
Such  was  the  oath  that  Mounier,  looking  back  years 
afterwards,  in  exile,  and  in  antagonism  to  the  triumph- 
ant Revolution,  still  found  it  good  to  have  proposed 
and  sworn  to.  Bailly  took  the  oath  first.  He  was  so 
calm,  so  collected,  that  his  voice  never  faltered  over  the 
momentous  words.  His  utterance  was  so  loud  and  clear 
that  every  man  in  that  great  audience,  and  many  men 
outside  that  great  audience,  heard  him  and  applauded 
him.  Then  followed  that  memorable  scene  which  a  hun- 
dred pictures  and  descriptions  have  rendered  as  familiar 
to  most  of  us  as  remembered  episodes  in  our  own  lives. 
Do  we  not  know  that  eager  rush  of  deputies  concentrat- 
ing around  the  table  where  Bailly  stands?  Can  we  not 
see  the  six  hundred  hands  uplifted  in  solemn  if  slightly 
theatrical  unison,  the  eager  faces  lifted  up  to  a  heaven 
beyond  the  bare  roof  of  the  tennis  -  court,  the  eager 
faces  peering  down  from  galleries  and  apertures?  Can 
we  not  hear  the  hubbub  of  wild  voices  repeating  the 
oath,  the  clamor  of  spectators  shrieking  a  more  than 
Roman  applause?  It  is  a  great  scene,  and  the  very 
thought  of  it  makes  the  blood  come  quicker,  though  it 
is  exactly  a  hundred  years  between  this  June  in  which 
we  write  and  the  June  when  that  mighty  oath  was 
sworn.  It  was  the  greatest  game  of  tennis  ever  played 
on  earth,  and  the  balls  were  the  crowns,  even  the  heads 
of  kings.  Swearing  over,  the  turn  came  for  signing. 


1789.  MARTIN  D'AUCH. 


577 


Every  man  who  had  lifted  his  right  hand  in  support  of 
Mounier's  resolution  should  with  the  same  right  hand 
append  his  name  to  the  written  oath.  This  the  depu- 
ties did,  working  hard,  for  it  took  time  to  inscribe  those 
six  hundred  names — until  four  of  the  clock  of  that  sum- 
mer afternoon.  One  man,  and  one  alone,  of  all  that 
vast  crowd  had  the  hardiness  or  the  foolhardiness  to 
oppose  the  popular  impulse.  M.  Martin  d'Auch,  of 
Castelnaudary,  in  Languedoc,  emerged  for  the  first  and 
only  time  from  obscurity  to  win  for  himself  something 
of  the  same  kind  of  fame  obtained  by  the  fool  whcr  set 
fire  to  the  Temple  of  Ephesus.  He  wrote  his  name,  and 
wrote  after  it  the  word  "  opposant,"  in  token  that  he 
would  have  none  of  Mounier  and  Bailly  and  the  wild 
ways  of  an  audacious  democracy.  The  luckless  Lan- 
guedocian  deputy  had  indeed  the  courage  of  his  queer 
opinions.  He  came  very  near  to  paying  for  his  courage 
and  his  queer  opinions  with  his  life.  Many  of  his  col- 
leagues insulted  him.  Furious  spectators  denounced 
him  to  the  crowd  outside,  who  began  to  yell  for  his 
blood,  and  to  brandish  weapons.  That  Languedocian 
life  would  not  have  been  worth  a  copper  coin  if  its 
owner  had  passed  into  the  midst  of  that  murderous 
mob.  Bailly,  who  did  not  know  what  was  going  on, 
saw  the  scuffling,  heard  the  clamor.  He  forced  his  way 
into  the  heart  of  the  throng  of  furious  deputies,  leaped 
upon  the  table  to  command  attention,  and  had  Martin 
d'Auch  brought  before  him.  Martin  d'Auch  seems  to 
have  been,  up  to  this  point,  if  not  cool,  at  least  clear  as 
to  his  purpose,  and  dogged  in  maintaining  it.  He  could 
not  swear  to  execute  acts  not  sanctioned  by  the  king. 
Bailly  argued  with  him,  reproved  him  severely  even,  in 
the  hope  "  of  satisfying  the  general  discontent."  Out- 
side the  clamor  was  increasing.  Bailly  ordered  Deputy 

10^7 
. <J  4 


578  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL. 

Martin  d'Auch  to  conduct  himself  or  be  conducted  away 
as  quickly  and  quietly  as  possible.  He  was  carried  by 
the  more  kindly  of  his  colleagues  to  a  side-door.  There, 
overcome  by  the  whirlwind  himself  had  raised,  he  fell 
fainting,  and  exclaiming,  "This  will  be  my  death  !" 
Even  at  that  side-door  it  would  seem  that  he  was  only 
conveyed  safely  away  on  the  assurances  of  his  escort 
that  his  mind  was  unhinged.  M.  Boulle  was  much  ex- 
ercised by  his  colleague's  conduct.  "Why,"  he  wrote, 
plaintively,  "should  this  sublime  moment  be  selected  by 
one  of  our  number  to  dishonor  himself  ?"  He  goes  on 
to  say  that  "what  is  strange  is,  he  had  not  behaved 
badly  up  to  that  time,  and  he  voted  for  the  Constitu- 
tion." He  adds :  "  His  name  is  now  blasted  through- 
out France.  And  the  unfortunate  man  has  children  !" 
Blasted  throughout  France,  indeed.  The  memory  of 
poor  puzzle-headed  Martin  d'Auch  has  earned  an  im- 
mortality of  infamy  for  that  solitary  act  of  folly  or  less 
than  folly.  In  that  building  which  commemorates  the 
tennis-court  oath,  and  where  the  names  of  the  illustri- 
ous six  hundred  are  duly  inscribed,  and  each  encircled 
by  its  wreath  of  honor,  the  space  where  the  name  of 
Martin  d'Auch  would  come  is  left  blank,  as  the  space 
for  Marino  Faliero  is  left  blank  in  the  gallery  of  the 
Venetian  Doges. 

What  seems  to  have  most  annoyed  the  deputies  was 
not  so  much  Martin  d' Audi's  refusal  to  swear  as  they 
had  sworn,  but  his  audacity  in  marring  the  fair  una- 
nimity of  the  document  to  which  they  subscribed  by 
putting- his  own  name  thereto  and  adding  the  word 
"  opposant."  Some  of  the  more  vehement  spirits  were 
for  erasing  at  once  alike  the  name  and  the  qualifica- 
tion. Others,  much  more  prudent  and  more  far -see- 
ing,, urged  that  it  should  be  left  upon  the  document 


1789.  THE  RESOLUTE  IRRESOLUTE.  579 

untouched.  They  argued,  or  might  have  argued,  that 
the  very  exception  made  unanimity  of  the  other  depu- 
ties only  the  more  apparent  and  the  more  important. 
These  counsels  carried  the  day,  and  proved  at  least 
that  the  new  Assembly  was  capable  of  respecting  lib- 
erty of  opinion  and  the  voice  of  the  smallest  minority. 

This  was  the  last  of  Martin  d'Auch.  I  have  not 
learned,  I  do  not  know  if  it  is  possible  to  learn,  what 
became  of  him,  bearing  that  "  name  blasted  throughout 
France."  One  would  like  to  hear  his  side  of  the  story, 
like  to  learn  the  motives,  clear  or  confused,  which  led 
him — one  against  so  many — to  do  and  dare  on  that  fa- 
mous day.  The  minority  are  always  in  the  right,  says 
the  eccentric  reformer  in  one  of  Henrik  Ibsen's  come- 
dies. We  may  be  permitted  to  think  with  Mounier  and 
Boulle  and  most  other  people  that  the  minority  of  Mar- 
tin d'Auch  was  in  the  wrong  in  this  instance.  But  his 
memoirs  would  be  rare  reading :  his  notes  on  the  vari- 
ous phases  of  the  Revolution,  if  he  lived  through  them 
and  made  notes,  as  full  of  matter  as  the  meditations  of 
Jacques.  The  private  opinion  of  a  highly  respectable 
"  crank "  on  that  amazing  panorama  of  method  and 
madness,  the  French  Revolution,  could  not  fail  to  be 
curious  and  probably  diverting.  One  may  wonder,  too, 
with  a  touch  of  pity,  what  became  of  those  children, 
luckless  bearers  of  a  "name  blasted  throughout  France." 
Did  they  rejoice  in  their  stubborn  old  father,  or  slip 
away  from  him,  and,  later,  change  the  branded  name 
and  seek  oblivion  as  respectable  Citizen  This  or  Citizen 
That  ?  Are  there  descendants  still  of  that  resolute  ir- 
resolute? In  all  that  full,  instructive  episode  of  the 
session  of  the  tennis-court  there  is  nothing  in  its  way 
more  instructive,  more  significant,  than  the  story  of 
Martin  d'Auch.  It  is  bad  to  play  the  part  of  odd  man 


580  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  -  CH.  XL. 

out  when  one  happens  to  be  in  a  minority  of  one  against 
six  hundred  gentlemen  who  are  engaged,  consciously  or 
unconsciously,  in  making  a  revolution. 

Before  the  tennis  -  court  meeting  broke  up,  the  Na- 
tional Assembly  had  resolved  that  when  the  meeting  of 
the  royal  session  of  the  22d  concluded,  the  members 
should  remain  in  the  hall — their  hall — to  continue  their 
deliberations.  But  the  session  was  still  to  be  delayed. 
The  royal  intelligence  or  lack  of  intelligence  at  Marly 
was  being  primed  by  noble  audacity.  The  Nobility 
Chamber  sent  a  deputation  of  forty-three  of  its  mem- 
bers to  carry  an  address  to  the  king,  assuring  him  that 
the  question  now  concerned  him  even  more  than  them. 
He  replied  in  a  lofty  vein,  the  mouth-piece  of  some  abler 
inspiration  than  his  own,  "Patriotism  and  love  for  their 
king  have  always  distinguished  the  French  nobility," 
and  so  forth,  and  so  forth.  Louis  declared  that  he  ex- 
pected, with  a  full  confidence  in  the  fidelity  of  the  no- 
bles, that  they  would  adopt  the  conciliatory  measures 
with  which  he,  for  the  good  of  his  people,  was  busy. 

It  was  not  quite  easy  to  see  where  the  conciliation 
came  in.  Would  that  it  were  possible  to  have  a  full, 
exhaustive,  and  impartial  account  of  everything  that 
took  place  at  Marly  during  the  momentous  hours  of  that 
Sunday  !  Would  that  we  might  follow,  step  by  step  and 
thread  by  thread,  all  the  workings  of  the  courtly  plot, 
all  the  complications  of  the  courtly  intrigues !  What- 
ever the  deliberations  of  the  Sunday  were,  they  bore 
fruit  in  a  further  postponement  of  the  royal  session.  A 
fresh  proclamation  put  the  ceremony  off  from  Monday, 
the  22d,  to  Tuesday,  the  23d.  Once  more  the  National 
Assembly  found  the  doors  of  the  Salle  des  Menus  closed 
against  them;  once  more  they  found  themselves  with- 
out a  legislative  home.  They  did  not  again  go  to  the 


1789.  A  CONTRARY  RESULT.  581 

tennis-court ;  why,  is  not  absolutely  certain  ;  conflict- 
ing history  offers  two  reasons.  The  first,  and  more  dra- 
matic, is  that  the  Count  d'Artois,  in  a  fit  of  more  than 
usually  foolish  bluster,  had  retained  the  court  for  his 
own  use,  intending  to  divert  himself  and  his  friends  by 
playing  tennis  on  the  spot  where  the  National  Assembly 
had  dared  to  assert  itself.  The  second  story,  which  is 
backed  by  the  authority  of  Bailly,  of  De  Ferrieres,  of 
Rabant  Saint-Etienne,  and  of  the  "  Two  Friends  of  Lib- 
erty," is  that  the  populace,  expecting  a  second  tennis- 
court  sitting,  had  crowded  into  the  place  to  witness  the 
deliberations,  and  that  the  deputies  did  not  think  there 
was  sufficient  space  left  to  them  to  work  in  comfort. 
Whatever  the  cause,  we  may.be  permitted  to  feel  glad 
that  history  does  not  record  a  second  tennis-court  meet- 
ing to  dim  the  unique  interest  of  the  first.  Whatever 
the  cause,  the  place  where  they  did  meet  was  still  more 
favorable  to  the  fortunes  of  the  Third  Estate.  The 
deputies  tried  to  find  asylum  at  the  Recollets,  but  failed, 
as  its  members  were  afraid  to  commit  themselves.  But 
it  now  seemed  that  some  hundred  and  forty-nine  mem- 
bers of  the  Clerical  Chamber,  anxious  to  join  the  Third 
Estate,  had  taken  up  their  quarters  in  the  Church  of  St. 
Louis.  The  unlucky  king's  ill-advised  delay  brought 
about  the  very  thing  most  essentially  to  be  avoided  by 
the  king's  party — the  fusion  between  the  clerical  and 
popular  orders.  In  the  nave  of  the  Church  of  St.  Louis 
the  National  Assembly  "set  in  their  staff."  A  table 
was  set  for  the  president  and  his  secretaries.  A  number 
of  chairs  to  right  and  left  represented  respectively  the 
natural  places  of  the  clerical  and  noble  orders.  The 
public  were  admitted,  and  the  church  was  very  soon  full. 
At  two  o'clock  the  ecclesiastics,  who  had  assembled  in 
the  choir,  entered  the  nave  under  the  guidance  of  the 


582  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL. 

Archbishops  of  Vienne  and  Bordeaux  and  the  Bishops 
of  Rodez,  Coutances,  and  Chartres,  and  solemnly  took 
their  places  with  the  National  Assembly.  "  The  temple 
of  religion,"  it  was  happily  said,  "  became  the  temple  of 
the  country."  The  fusion  between  the  two  orders  was 
practically  accomplished.  A  popular  picture  of  the 
time  represents  a  peasant  leaving  his  plough  to  grasp 
the  hand  of  a  priest  who  greets  him  cordially :  "  Tou- 
chez-la,  Monsieur  le  cure ;  j'savais  ben  que  vous  seriais 
des  notres,"  says  the  legend.  The  artist,  either  care- 
lessly or  ironically — probably  carelessly — has  represent- 
ed these  types  of  the  two  orders  as  offering  each  other 
their  left  hands.  Left-handed  or  right-handed,  the  sal- 
utation had  taken  place.  It  would  have  been  better  for 
the  king  and  his  courtly  counsellors  not  to  have  post- 
poned that  royal  session. 

On  Tuesday,  June  23d,  however,  the  royal  session  did 
take  place.  It  began  with  sombre  auspices  for  the  Third 
Estate.  Bailly  was  troubled  in  his  mind  by  memories 
of  a  nocturnal  visit  from  Baron  de  Menon,  the  Duke 
d'Aiguillon,  and  Count  Mathieu  de  Montmorency,  who 
came  with  tidings  that  Necker  had  broken  with  the 
court  and  would  not  attend  the  session.  Revolving 
many  cares  in  his  mind,  like  pious  ^Eneas,  Bailly  came 
to  the  Salle  des  Menus  to  find  fresh  cares  awaiting  him. 
The  old,  tedious,  ill-advised  insults  were  repeated.  The 
deputies  of  the  Third  Estate  were  kept  outside  the 
door  in  driving  rain — it  rained  a  good  deal  that  June. 
The  place  and  the  environs  were  surrounded  by  a  men- 
acing display  of  armed  troops.  While  the  clerical  and 
noble  orders  were  afforded  entrance  by  one  door,  the 
Third  Estate  was  kept  a  long  time  dancing  attendance 
at  another  door,  until  at  last  Bailly's  declaration  that 
the  National  Assembly  would,  as  one  man,  bodily  take 


1789.  NBCKER'S  PALTRY  SCHEME.  533 

its  departure  moved  even  the  stolid  officialism  of  M.  de 
Breze,  and  the  indignant  Third  Estate  came  into  the 
hall  to  find  the  two  other  orders  seated.  Save  that  the 
public  was  not  present,  the  hall  wore  much  the  same 
aspect  as  it  did  on  that  day  when  the  States-General 
opened.  But  if  the  public  was  not  present,  neither  was 
Necker.  His  place  lay  ominously  vacant,  giving  rise  to 
much  wonder.  Those  who  were  in  the  courtly  swim 
knew  why.  Bailly  knew  why.  The  news  soon  spread 
to  the  less  learned.  Necker  had  his  plan  for  meeting  the 
difficulties  of  the  situation.  He  had  framed  a  scheme  as 
ludicrously  inefficient  as  Mrs.  Partington's  mop  and  pail, 
by  which  a  kind  of  bastard  imitation  of  the  English  con- 
stitutional system  was  to  be  grafted  onto  or  superim- 
posed upon  most  of  the  old  evil  system.  He  was  for  two 
chambers.  He  was  for  a  principle  of  voting  by  which 
the  orders  voted  together  on  unimportant  and  separately 
upon  important  matters.  He  was  for  an  establishment 
of  provincial  States  or  Parliaments.  He  was  for  non- 
publicity  of  meeting — for  everything,  in  a  word,  which 
awakening  France  just  then  did  not  happen  at  all  to 
want.  But,  paltry  and  peddling  as  Necker's  scheme 
was,  it  was  too  much  for  the  king,  or,  rather,  for  the 
wire-pullers  behind  the  king.  The  kingly  party  would 
have  no  concessions.  The  king  came  down  to  Versailles 
on  June  23d,  to  meet  the  mutinous  Third  Estate,  with 
an  elaborate  declaration  of  autocratic  bluster.  Necker 
resigned.  He  was  a  weak,  vain  man,  incapable  of  appre- 
ciating or  dealing  with  the  great  occasion,  but  he  could 
not  go  with  the  kingly  party.  He  resigned,  and  the 
kingly  party  blundered  on  without  him. 

The  king  read,  with  his  usual  plainness  of  manner, 
the  speech  composed  for  him.  He  spoke  the  despot- 
ic language  that  came  so  strangely  from  his  lips.  He 


584  THE  FRENCH  iiEVOLtJTiotf.  CH.XL. 

censured  the  conduct  of  the  Assembly,  regaining  it  only 
as  the  order  of  the  Third  Estate.  He  annulled  its  decrees, 
enjoined  the  continuance  of  the  orders,  imposed  reforms, 
arid  determined  their  limits ;  then  he  enumerated  the 
benefits  that  kingly  condescension  allowed. 

These  were  publicity  for  finance,  voting  of  taxes,  and 
regulation  of  the  expenditure.  For  this  the  States  will 
indicate  the  means,  and  his  Majesty  "would  adopt  them, 
if  they  were  compatible  with  the  kingly  dignity  and 
the  despatch  of  the  public  service."  Having  gone  so 
far,  the  king  further  condescended  to  sanction  the  equal- 
ity of  taxation  when  the  clergy  and  the  nobility  should 
be  willing  to  renounce  their  pecuniary  privileges.  The 
dues  of  property  were  to  be  respected,  especially  tithes, 
feudal  rights,  and  duties.  The  king  invited  the  States 
to  seek  for  and  to  propose  to  him  means  for  reconciling 
the  abolition  of  the  lettres  de  cachet,  with  the  precau- 
tions necessary  either  for  protecting  the  honor  of  fam- 
ilies, or  for  repressing  the  commencement  of  sedition  and 
the  like.  The  States  were  also  to  seek  the  means  of 
reconciling  the  liberty  of  the  press  with  the  respect 
due  to  religion,  the  morals,  and  the  honor  of  the  citi- 
zens. The  king  then  declared  in  the  most  decided  man- 
ner that  he  would  preserve  entire,  and  without  the 
slightest  alteration,  the  institution  of  the  army.  To  say 
that  was  to  say  that  the  plebeian  should  never  attain 
any  grade  in  the  army. 

The  amiable  despot  appeared  scarcely  to  appreciate 
the  provoking  violence  of  his  speech,  for  he  appeared 
surprised  at  the  aspect  of  the  Assembly.  When  the 
nobles  ventured  to  applaud  the  article  consecrating 
feudal  rights,  loud  voices  cried  from  the  Third  Estate 
for  silence. 

The  king,  after  a  moment's  pause  and  astonishment, 


1789.  Atf  INSANE  MENACE.  585 

continued  with  a  grave,  intolerable  sentence,  which  flung 
down  the  gauntlet  to  the  Assembly,  and  began  the  war: 
"If  you  abandon  me  in  so  excellent  an  enterprise,  I 
will,  alone,  effect  the  welfare  of  my  people  ;  alone,  I 
shall  consider  myself  as  their  true  representative !" 
Then  he  made  a  bad  and  foolish  ending  to  a  bad  and 
foolish  speech:  "  I  order  you,  gentlemen,  to  disperse  im- 
mediately, and  to  repair  to-morrow  morning  to  the 
chambers  appropriated  to  your  order,  there  to  resume 
your  sitting."  Having  uttered  this  insane  menace,  the 
king  left  the  chamber,  followed  by  the  whole  of  the 
courtly  party.  The  deputies  remained  alone,  looking 
at  each  other  in  a  brief  composed  silence.  But  the  si- 
lence was  soon  broken. 

Mirabeau,  who,  with  the  instinct  of  the  true  leader, 
had  been  more  and  more  asserting  himself,  rose  and 
said  :  "  Gentlemen,  I  admit  that  what  you  have  just 
heard  might  be  for  the  welfare  of  the  country,  were  it 
not  that  the  presents  of  despotism  are  always  danger- 
ous. What  is  this  insulting  dictatorship?  The  pomp 
of  arms,  the  violation  of  the  national  temple,  are  resort- 
ed to — to  command  you  to  be  happy !  Who  gives  this 
command  ?  Your  mandatary.  Who  makes  these  im- 
perious laws  for  you  ?  Your  mandatary;  he  who  should 
rather  receive  them  from  you,  gentlemen — from  us,  who 
are  invested  with  a  political  and  inviolable  priesthood ; 
from  us,  in  a  word,  to  whom  alone  twenty-five  millions 
of  men  are  looking  for  certain  happiness,  because  it  is 
to  be  consented  to,  and  given  and  received  by  all.  But 
the  liberty  of  your  discussions  is  enchained;  a  military 
force  surrounds  the  Assembly !  Where  are  the  enemies 
of  the  nation?  Is  Catiline  at  our  gates?  I  demand, 
investing  yourselves  with  your  dignity,  with  your  legis- 
lative power,  you  enclose  yourselves  within  the  religion 


586  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL. 

of  your  oath.  It  does  not  permit  you  to  separate  till 
you  have  formed  a  Constitution." 

Mirabeau  had  scarcely  ended  when  the  master  of  the 
ceremonies,  De  Breze,  entered  and  said  to  the  presi- 
dent, in  a  low  tone, "  Sir,  you  heard  the  king's  order!" 
Bailly  seems  hardly  to  have  risen  to  the  importance  of 
the  occasion.  He  replied,  "  The  Assembly  adjourned 
after  the  royal  meeting  ;  I  cannot  dismiss  it  till  it  has 
deliberated."  Then  turning  towards  his  colleagues  near 
him:  "  It  seems  to  me  that  the  assembled  nation  cannot 
receive  any  orders." 

That  sentence  was  admirably  taken  up  by  Mirabeau, 
who  addressed  himself  to  the  master  of  the  ceremonies. 
But  if  Bailly  was  weak,  Mirabeau  was  strong.  Though 
he  was  not  in  the  least  entitled  to  make  himself  the 
spokesman  of  the  Assembly,  he  seized  upon  the  new  op- 
portunity. With  his  powerful  and  imposing  voice,  and 
with  terrible  dignity,  he  hurled  back  these  words:  "We 
have  heard  the  intentions  suggested  to  the  king ;  and 
you,  sir,  who  can  never  be  his  organ  to  the  National 
Assembly — you,  who  have  here  neither  place,  voice,  nor 
right  to  speak — you  are  not  a  man  to  remind  us  of  his 
discourse.  Go  and  tell  those  who  send  you  that  we  are 
here  by  the  will  of  the  people,  and  are  to  be  driven 
hence  only  by  the  power  of  bayonets." 

Breze  was  disconcerted,  thunderstruck ;  he  felt  the 
power  of  that  new  royalty,  and  rendering  to  the  one 
what  etiquette  commanded  for  the  other,  he  retired 
walking  backward,  as  was  the  custom  before  the  king. 
The  court  had  imagined  another  way  to  disperse  the 
States-General :  mei'ely  to  have  the  hall  dismantled,  to 
demolish  the  amphitheatre  and  the  king's  estrade.  Work- 
men accordingly  entered,  but  at  one  word  from  the  pres- 
ident they  stopped,  laid  down  their  tools,  contemplated 


1789.  .        THE  BATTLE  BEGINS.  587 

with  surprise  the  calm  dignity  of  the  Assembly,  and  be- 
came attentive  auditors  of  a  momentous  discussion. 

A  deputy  proposed  to  discuss  the  king's  resolutions 
on  the  morrow.  He  was  not  listened  to.  Barnave,  the 
young  member  for  Dauphine,  laid  down  forcibly  the 
heroic  doctrine,  "You  have  declared  what  you  are;  you 
need  no  sanction."  Gleizen,  the  Breton,  asked  if  the 
sovereign  spoke  as  a  master,  where  he  ought  to  consult. 
Petion,  Buzot,  Garat,  Gregoire,  spoke  with  equal  energy. 
"  You  are  to-day,"  added  Sieyes,  calmly,  "  what  you 
were  yesterday.  Let  us  deliberate."  The  Assembly, 
full  of  resolution  and  dignity,  began  the  debate  accord- 
ingly. On  the  motion  of.  Camus  it  was  declared  "  that 
the  sitting  was  but  a  ministerial  act,  and  that  the  As- 
sembly persisted  in  its  decrees."  The  Assembly  next 
declared,  on  Mirabeau's  proposal,  that  its  members  were 
inviolable  ;  that  whoever  laid  hands  on  a  deputy  was  a 
traitor,  infamous,  and  worthy  of  death. 

The  battle  between  the  court  and  the  people  had 
definitely  begun.  The  king  was  wholly  unequal  to  the 
occasion.  He  talked  daggers,  but  he  used  none.  When 
De  Breze,  who  came  and  informed  him  that  the  depu- 
ties of  the  Third  Estate  remained  sitting,  asked  for  or- 
ders, he  walked  about  for  a  few  minutes,  and  said  at 
last,  in  the  tone  of  one  tired  to  death,  "Very  well;  leave 
them  alone."  That  was  all  he  could  think  of.  He  had 
denounced  them;  had  met  their  resolutions  with  a  for- 
mal and  autocratic  dissolution,  and  when  they  still  per- 
sisted in  their  course  he  could  only  say,  with  a  weary 
shrug  of  his  shoulders,  "  Very  well;  leave  them  alone." 
But  the  queen  and  the  court  were  not  willing  to  let 
them  alone,  and  the  next  few  days  witnessed  the  growth, 
on  the  one  hand  of  the  Assembly,  and  on  the  other  of 
a  plot  to  put  that  Assembly  out  of  the  way  forever. 


588  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XL. 

On  June  24th  the  clerical  order  broke  into  two. 
The  hundred  and  forty-nine  who  sympathized  with  the 
Third  Estate  went  from  their  hall  to  the  Commons' 
hall,  while  the  remainder,  by  a  vote  of  132  to  118,  de- 
clared themselves  the  "active  Assembly  of  the  Clerical 
Order  at  the  States-General."  They  might  have  as 
well  declared  themselves  Emperors  of  the  East  for  all 
the  good  it  did  them.  In  the  noble  order  faction  was 
also  at  work.  Clermont-Tonnerre,  the  gallant  cavalry 
colonel,  the  advanced  young  noble  who  little  dreamed 
that  he  would  one  day  vote  for  veto,  support  the  dicta- 
torship of  the  king,  and  die  ignominiously  by  the  hands 
of  the  crowd,  urged  the  nobles  to  join  the  Third  Es- 
tate and  the  dissentient  clergy.  Lally-Tollendal  urged 
the  same  thing;  but  he  and  those  who  thought  with 
him  were  outvoted.  In  the  Commons  little  happened. 
The  Assembly  decreed  the  establishment  of  a  printing- 
house  at  Versailles  for  the  service  of  the  Assembly, 
and  named  Baudoin,  the  Paris  deputy,  as  their  printer. 
Bailly  read  a  letter  from  Necker  thanking  the  Third 
Estate  for  their  marks  of  interest  on  the  previous  day. 
A  nominal  verification  of  the  powers  of  the  dissentient 
clergy  took  place  on  the  motion  of  the  Archbishop  of 
Vienne,  "  in  order  that  they  might  deliberate  in  the 
general  assembly  of  the  representatives  of  the  nation." 
On  the  25th  more  ecclesiastics  came  over  to  the  Third 
Estate,  and,  more  significant  still,  so  did  some  forty-five 
of  the  nobles,  including  De  Beauharnais,  happy  in  a 
fair  wife  from  Martinique,  who  shall  yet  be  an  empress; 
The  Duke  de  la  Rochefoucauld,  whose  coffin  shall  be 
broken  by  a  revengeful  monarchy  more  than  a  genera- 
tion later;  the  Duke  d'Aiguillon,  and,  most  conspicuous 
of  all,  the  Duke  d'Orleans. 

The  prince's  man,  Sillery,  the  convenient  husband  of 


1789.  TIIE   DUKE  D'ORLEANS. 


589 


Madame  de  Genlis,  as  Mirabeau  calls  him,  pronounced, 
in  the  name  of  all,  an  inappropriate  discourse,  such  as 
might  have  been  made  by  a  mediator,  an  accepted  ar- 
biter between  the  king  and  the  people :  "  Let  us  never 
lose  sight  of  the  respect  that  we  owe  to  the  best  of 
kings.  He  offers  us  peace  ;  can  we  refuse  to  accept  it  ?" 
But  D'Orleans  was  rapidly  drifting  from  compromise 
of  the  Sillery  kind.  He  was  now  playing  the  part,  or 
being  made  to  play  the  part,  of  a  regular  leader.  He 
had  a  party  who  regarded  him  as  a  head  or  a  figure- 
head, it  is  hard  to. say  which,  and  who  had  a  distinct 
and  defined  programme.  They  wished  to  bring  about 
the  abdication  of  Louis  XVI.,  and  the  elevation  of  the 
Duke  d'Orleans  to  the  throne.  The  duke  himself,  ac- 
cording to  some  evidence,  had  no  such  vaulting  am- 
bition, whatever  the  pushing  Saint -Huruge  and  the 
pushing  Choderlos  de  Laclos  might  design  for  their 
pleasure-loving  puppet. 

"  The  duke  was  a  man  of  pleasure,"  writes  Mrs.  Elli- 
ott, "  who  never  could  bear  trouble  or  business  of  any 
kind,  who  never  read  or  did  anything  but  amuse  him- 
self. I  am  certain  that  he  never  at  that  time  had  an 
idea  of  mounting  the  throne,  whatever  the  views  of  his 
factious  friends  might  have  been.  If  they  could  have 
placed  him  on  the  throne  of  France,  I  suppose  they 
hoped  to  govern  him  and  the  country."  Others,  too,  be- 
sides Mrs.  Elliott  saw  in  him  only  a  dissipated,  weak 
creature,  the  tool  of  daring  and  desperate  men — and 
women.  But  he  was  something  more  than  that. 

With  such  strange  allies  about  him  and  behind  him, 
D'Orleans  was  drifting  to  his  doom.  His  tired,  blood- 
shot eyes  were  fixed,  it  would  seem,  upon  the  crown. 
They  were  not  far-sighted  enough  to  see  what  lay  be- 
yond. Just  at  this  moment,  however,  his  advent  was  of 


590  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL. 

great  value  to  the  Third  Estate.  His  popularity,  how- 
ever gained,  however  factitious,  was  an  arm  against  that 
menace  of  armed  force  which  still  threatened  the  Assem- 
bly. On  this  very  June  25th,  after  D'Orleans'  arrival, 
Barnave  proposed  and  formed  a  deputation  to  the  king, 
to  protest  against  the  troops  that  surrounded  the  States- 
General,  to  ask  for  their  recall,  and  the  free  entry  of  the 
people  to  the  sittings.  It  was  a  timely  move  on  Bar- 
nave's  part.  The  people  outside  were  growing  fiercely 
excited  at  the  sight  of  the  soldiers  and  at  the  shutting 
of  the  doors  against  them.  They  might  have  proceeded 
to  some  desperate  extremity  to  try  and  force  an  en- 
trance, when  Bailly,  Clermont-Tonnerre,  and  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Vienne  came  to  them,  and  calmed  them  with 
the  news  of  Barnave's  deputation. 

On  the  26th  a  deputation  from  the  electors  of  Paris 
came  to  cheer  the  Assembly  with  a  commendation  of  its 
virtues.  There  was  better  cheer  still  in  the  advent  of 
Talleyrand-Perigord,  Bishop  of  Autun,  to  join  the  Third 
Estate.  Others  followed  his  example,  most  notably  De 
Juigne,  Archbishop  of  Paris,  whose  action,  said  grace- 
ful Bailly,  added  the  only  crown  yet  lacking  to  his 
virtue.  On  the  27th  the  game  was  up.  The  king  wrote 
to  the  clerical  and  the  noble  orders,  bidding  them  join 
their  colleagues  of  the  Third  Estate.  Under  protest,  the 
minority  of  the  clergy  and  the  majority  of  the  nobles 
obeyed  the  royal  order.  Even  in  the  Commons'  hall 
the  nobles  still  for  a  while  persisted  in  sitting  apart  as 
a  special  order,  with  the  Duke  de  Luxembourg  at  their 
head;  but  after  a  time  the  distinct  seats  became  con- 
founded, and  "the  futile  pre-eminences  of  rank  vanished 
before  national  authority."  One  dogged  gentleman  in- 
deed, the  Baron  de  Lupe,  noble  deputy  for  Auch,  scorn- 
ful of  all  compromise,  refused  to  come  over.  He  sat  in 


1789.  THE   BATTLE  FOUGHT   AND   WON.  591 

stubborn  and  solitary  grandeur  all  by  himself  in  the 
Chamber  of  the  Nobility,  until  at  last  the  court  officials 
shut  its  doors,  and  deprived  him  of  his  gloomy  joy. 
Even  then,  however,  he  was  not  to  be  beaten  ;  he  made 
a  point  of  coming  daily  and  walking  up  and  down  the 
corridor  outside  the  chamber  for  a  certain  time  each 
day,  an  incarnation  of  the  insane  obstinacy  of  his  order. 
The  Duke  de  Luxembourg  made  a  stately  little  speech, 
in  which  he  set  forth  his  sense  of  duty  to  his  king. 
Bailly,  ever  graceful,  expressed  his  joy  at  the  event,  and 
declared  that  an  hour  so  happy  should  not  be  troubled 
with  any  work.  "  Our  sitting  should  end  now."  The 
sitting  did  end  accordingly,  with  cries  of  "  Long  live 
the  king,"  genuine  enough  still  from  all  those  lips,  roy- 
alist still,  if  we  except  the  lips  of  the  Orleanist  faction. 
The  Assembly  adjourned.  The  great  battle  had  been 
fought  and  won ;  the  three  orders  were  united  accord- 
ing to  the  will  of  the  Third  Estate.  A  careless  on-look- 
er  might  imagine  that  the  struggle  was  over ;  that  the 
Saturnian  age,  long  looked  for,  had  arrived.  The  care- 
less observer  would  be  wrong,  as  careless  observers  usu- 
ally are.  The  court  had  apparently  given  way,  but  had 
only  given  way  to  mask  its  deep  revenge ;  while  suspi- 
cion, irritation,  and  triumph  had  done  the  one  thing  that 
of  all  others  was  most  deadly  to  the  courtly  party — had 
alarmed  and  aroused  Paris. 


592  TI1E  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLI. 


CHAPTER  XLI. 

PARIS    AND   VERSAILLES. 

PARIS  and  Versailles  were  wild  with  excitement.  Bon- 
fires blazed  in  the  streets,  and  an  enthusiastic  populace 
indulged  in  wild  dances  round  them,  incapable  of  con- 
fining their  exultation  within  more  sober  limits.  In 
Paris,  especially,  the  enthusiasm  was  at  its  hottest  and 
maddest.  Paris  had  been  suspicious,  alarmed,  almost 
desperate ;  it  seemed  now  to  have  won  the  day,  and 
gave  itself  over  to  a  very  carnival  of  exhilaration.  It 
is  difficult  to  form  a  comprehensive  idea  of  the  passion 
which  animated  the  city.  Even  those  who  were  present 
and  well  able  to  judge  misunderstood  the  force  of  events. 
Gouverneur  Morris  seemed  to  think  that  all  was  practi- 
cally at  an  end.  •  It  only  remained,  he  thought,  "  to  form 
a  constitution,  and  as  the  king  is  extremely  timid  he  will 
of  course  surrender  at  discretion.  The  existence  of  the 
monarchy  depends  on  the  moderation  of  the  Assembly. 
For  the  rest  I  think  they  will  soon  establish  their  credit, 
which,  among  other  things,  will  bring  the  exchange  be- 
tween France  and  foreign  nations  to  be  more  favorable, 
If  the  money  of  this  country  is  brought  into  free  circu- 
lation, it  will,  I  think,  lower  interest  everywhere.  The 
sum  is  immense,  and  its  effects  must  be  commensurate 
to  its  activity  and  mass.  At  present  it  lies  dead  and  is 
poorly  supplied  by  the  paper  Caisse  d'Escompte." 

There  was  an  even  keener  observer  than  Morris  in 
Paris.  Arthur  Young  gives  a  living  picture  of  the  ac- 


1789.  PAMPHLETS  PRO  AND  CON. 


593 


tivity  and  excitement  of  the  hour :  "  The  business  going 
forward  at  present  in  the  pamphlet  shops  of  Paris  is 
incredible.  I  went  to  the  Palais  Royal  to  see  what  new 
things  were  published,  and  to  procure  a  catalogue  of 
all.  Every  hour  produces  something  new.  Thirteen 
came  out  to-day,  sixteen  yesterday,  and  ninety-two  last 
week.  We  think  sometimes  that  Debrett's  or  Stock- 
dale's  shops  in  London  are  crowded,  but  they  are  mere 
deserts  compared  to  Desein's  and  some  others  here,  in 
which  one  can  scarcely  squeeze  from  the  door  to  the 
counter.  The  price  of  printing  two  years  ago  was  from 
twenty-seven  livres  to  thirty  livres  per  sheet,  but  now 
it  is  from  sixty  livres  to  eighty  livres.  This  spirit  of 
reading  political  tracts,  they  say,  spreads  into  the  prov- 
inces, so  that  all  the  presses  of  France  are  equally  em- 
ployed. Nineteen  twentieths  of  these  productions  are 
in  favor  of  liberty,  and  commonly  violent  against  the 
clergy  and  nobility ;  I  have  to-day  bespoken  many  of 
this  description,  that  have  reputation  ;  but  inquiring 
for  such  as  had  appeared  on  the  other  side  of  the  ques- 
tion, to  my  astonishment  I  find  there  are  but  two  or 
three  that  have  merit  enough  to  be  known.  Is  it  not 
wonderful,  that  while  the  press  teems  with  the  most 
levelling  and  even  seditious  principles,  that  if  put  into 
execution  would  overturn  the  monarchy,  nothing  in 
reply  appears,  not  the  least  step  is  taken  by  the  court 
to  restrain  this  extreme  licentiousness  of  publication? 
It  is  easy  to  conceive  the  spirit  that  must  thus  be  raised 
among  the  people.  But  the  coffee-houses  in  the  Palais 
Royal  present  yet  more  singular  and  astonishing  spec- 
tacles; they  are  not  only  crowded  within,  but  other  ex- 
pectant crowds  are  at  the  doors  and  windows,  listening 
d  gorge  deploy  ee  to  certain  orators,  who  from  chairs  or 
tables  harangue  each  his  little  audience ;  the  eagerness 
I.— 38 


594  THE    FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLL 

with  which  they  are  heard,  and  the  thunder  of  applause 
they  receive  for  every  sentiment  of  more  than  common 
hardiness  or  violence  against  the  present  government,  can- 
not easily  be  imagined.  I  am  all  amazement  at  the  min- 
istry permitting  such  nests  and  hotbeds  of  sedition  and 
revolt,  which  disseminate  among  the  people,  every  hour, 
principles  that  by-and-by  must  be  opposed  with  vigor, 
and  therefore  it  seems  little  short  of  madness  to  allow 
the  propagation  at  present." 

Again  he  writes:  "The  ferment  at  Paris  is  beyond 
conception;  ten  thousand  people  have  been  all  this  day 
in  the  Palais  Royal;  a  full  detail  of  yesterday's  pro- 
ceedings was  brought  this  morning,  and  read  by  many 
apparent  readers  of  little  parties,  with  comments  to  the 
people.  To  my  surprise,  the  king's  propositions  are 
received  with  universal  disgust.  He  said  nothing  ex- 
plicit on  the  periodical  meeting  of  the  States;  he  de- 
clared all  the  old  feudal  rights  to  be  retained  as  proper- 
ty. These,  and  the  change  in  the  balance  of  representa- 
tion in  the  Provincial  Assemblies,  are  the  articles  that 
give  the  greatest  offence.  But,  instead  of  looking  to  or 
hoping  for  further  concessions  on  these  points,  in  order 
to  make  them  more  consonant  to  the  general  wishes,  the 
people  seem,  with  a  sort  of  frenzy,  to  reject  all  idea  of 
compromise,  and  to  insist  on  the  necessity  of  the  orders 
uniting.  .  .  .  Every  hour  that  passes  seems  to  give  the 
people  fresh  spirit:  the  meetings  at  the  Palais  Royal  are 
more  numerous,  more  violent,  and  more  assured  ;  and 
in  the  Assembly  of  Electors,  chosen  for  the  purpose  of 
sending  a  deputation  to  the  National  Assembly,  the  lan- 
guage that  was  talked,  by  all  ranks  of  people,  was  noth- 
ing less  than  a  revolution  in  the  government,  and  the 
establishment  of  a  free  constitution.  What  they  mean 
by  a  free  constitution  is  easily  understood — a  republic; 


1789.  DOGE   OR  KING?  595 

for  the  doctrine  of  the  times  runs  every  day  more  and 
more  to  that  point;  yet  they  profess  that  the  kingdom 
ought  to  be  a  monarchy  too,  or,  at  least,  that  there 
ought  to  be  a  king.  In  the  streets  one  is  stunned  by 
the  hawkers  of  seditious  pamphlets,  and  descriptions  of 
pretended  events,  that  all  tend  to  keep  the  people 
equally  ignorant  and  alarmed.  The  supineness  and 
even  stupidity  of  the  court  is  without  example;  the 
moment  demands  the  greatest  decision;  and  yesterday, 
while  it  was  actually  a  question  whether* he  should  be 
a  Doge  of  Venice  or  a  King  of  France,  the  king  went 
a-hunting  !" 

This  keen-eyed,  .keen-witted  observer  tells  us  that 
in  these  most  interesting  discussions  he  found  a  gen- 
eral ignorance  of  the  principles  of  government.  There 
was  a  strange  and  unaccountable  appeal,  on  the  one 
side,  to  ideal  and  visionary  rights  of  nature;  and  on  the 
other  there  was  no  settled  plan  that  could  give  security 
to  the  people  for  being  in  future  in  a  much  better  situa- 
tion than  hitherto — a  security  absolutely  necessary.  All 
the  nobility,  with  the  principles  of  great  lords,  that  he 
conversed  with,  he  found  most  disgustingly  tenacious  of 
all  old  rights,  however  hard  they  might  bear  on  the 
people.  They  would  not  hear  of  giving  way  in  the 
least  to  the  spirit  of  liberty,  beyond  the  point  of  paying 
equal  land  taxes;  which  they  hold  to  be  all  that  can 
with  reason  be  demanded.  He  weighed  the  argument 
on  both  sides  calmly.  On  the  side  of  the  people,  it  was 
to  be  urged  that  the  vices  of  the  old  government  made 
a  new  system  necessary,  and  that  the  people  could  only 
be  put  in  possession  of  the  blessings  of  a  free  govern- 
ment by  the  firmest  measures.  But  be  thought  that  it 
could  be  replied,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  personal 
character  of  the  king  was  a  just  foundation  for  relying 


596  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLI. 

that  no  measures  of  actual  violence  were  to  be  seriously 
feared.  The  state  of  the  finances,  under  any  possible 
regimen,  whether  of  faith  or  bankruptcy,  must  secure 
their  existence,  at  least  for  time  sufficient  to  secure  by 
negotiation  what  might  be  hazarded  by  violence.  "By 
driving  things  to  extremities  the  patriots  risk  a  union 
between  all  the  other  orders  of  the  State,  with  the  par- 
liaments, army,  and  a  great  body  even  of  the  people, 
who  must  disapprove  of  all  extremities ;  and  when  to 
this  is  added  the  possibility  of  involving  the  kingdom 
in  a  civil  war,  now  so  familiarly  talked  of  that  it  is  upon 
the  lips  of  all  the  world,  we  must  confess  that  the  Com- 
mons, if  they  steadily  refuse  what  is  now  held  out  to 
them,  put  immense  and  certain  benefits  to  the  chance 
of  fortune,  to  that  hazard  which  may  make  posterity 
curse  instead  of  bless  their  memories  as  real  patriots, 
who  had  nothing  in  view  but  the  happiness  of  their 
country." 

Already  the  temper  of  the  mob  was  beginning  to  grow 
dangerous.  There  is  a  story,  perhaps  rather  a  legend, 
of  an  unlucky  lady,  a  countess  it  is  said,  who  ventured 
to  express  too  audibly  in  the  fermenting  regions  of  the 
Palais  Royal  her  disapproval  of  the  Third  Estate.  An- 
gry hands,  chiefly,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  feminine,  seized 
upon  the  perturbed  and  protesting  countess,  a  table  was 
sought  for  eagerly,  and  found  easily — there  are  always 
plenty  of  tables  in  the  Palais  Royal — and  on  this  table 
the  unlucky  lady  was  extended,  and  promptly  and  pub- 
licly whipped.  Thus  early  the  national  spirit  showed 
itself  paternal,  or  rather  maternal,  in  its  chastisement 
of  offenders.  This  was  the  first,  but  not  the  last,  time 
that  aristocratic  bodies  had  to  undergo  humiliating  pun- 
ishment from  the  new  masters.  In  another  case  an  old 
officer  was  made  to  go  down  on  his  knees  humbly  in  the 


1*789.  THE  COURT  PLAN.  597 

mud  of  the  Palais  Royal,  and  apologize  for  some  offence 
against  the  democratic  spirit.  Young  courtiers  who 
ventured  in,  thinking  that  they  could  swagger  it  off 
with  high  looks  and  hands  on  sword-hilts,  were  soon 
compelled  to  beat  ignominious  retreat,  lest  worse  should 
come  of  it.  A  man  suspected  of  being  a  spy  was  lit- 
erally hounded  to  death  by  the  mob.  All  these  signs 
were  significant  enough  of  the  rising  temper  of  Paris, 
but  their  full  significance  was  not  appreciated  by  the 
court. 

The  Court  party,  chafing  at  their  temporary  defeat — 
for  temporary  they  only  considered  it  to  be — were  rag- 
ing for  revenge.  They  insisted  in  their  secret  conclaves 
that  the  only  thing  to  do  was  to  suppress  the  Assembly, 
that  the  Assembly  was  only  to  be  suppressed  by  mili- 
tary force,  and  that  the  sooner  military  force  was  em- 
ployed the  better.  If  Paris  protested,  then  why  not 
treat  Paris  as  a  hostile  city,  turn  against  it  the  swords, 
the  bayonets,  the  cannon,  and  the  muskets  that  should 
have  already  blotted  out  the  Assembly,  and  blot  out 
factious  opposition  in  its  turn  in  Paris  with  a  few  caval- 
ry charges  and  a  few  rounds  of  cannon-shot?  That  was 
clearly  the  thing  to  do  :  wear  a  more  or  less  civil  front 
for  the  moment,  mass  troops  upon  Versailles  and  Paris, 
and  when  the  moment  came  then  to  work  with  a  will. 

The  court  was  not  without  means  for  the  perfection 
of  this  precious  plan.  Albert  Duruy,  in  his  admirable 
study  of  the  royal  army  in  1789,  with  infinite  pains  and 
patience  has  reconstructed  the  military  machinery  of 
the  kingdom  at  the  moment  of  the  revolutionary  out- 
break. M.  Albert  Babeau  has  added  to  his  "  Studies  of 
Social  Life  under  the  Old  Order  "  a  valuable  volume  on 
"La  Vie  Militaire;"  and  M.  Ch.  L.  Chassin's  "L'ArmSe 
et  la  Revolution  "  contains  much  information.  Much, 


598  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL!. 

too,  is  to  be  found  in  the  writings  of  the  Bibliophile 
Jacob.  On  January  1,  1789,  the  royal  army  consisted 
of  three  kinds  of  troops.  It  is  not  easy  to  ascertain 
precisely  the  numerical  strength  of  the  standing  army 
in  1789.  According  to  the  "£tat  Militaire  dc  la  France 
pour  1'Annee  1789,"  military  force  comprising  the  picked 
men  of  the  royal  household,  the  regular  troops,  and  the 
militia  amounted  to  two  hundred  and  thirty-six  thou- 
sand men  on  a  peace  footing,  and  two  hundred  and 
ninety-five  thousand  on  a  war  footing;  a  very  respecta- 
ble muster.  On  the  other  hand,  Grimoard,  in  his  "Ta- 
bleau Historique  de  la  Guerre  de  la  Revolution,"  esti- 
mates the  army  of  the  line  at  one  hundred  and  sixty- 
three  thousand  four  hundred  and  eighty  -  three  men, 
including  the  household  troops;  and  Baron  Poisson,  in 
his  "L'Arme'e  et  la  Garde  Nationale,"  puts  forward 
the  round  number  of  one  hundred  and  sixty  thousand. 
That  is  to  say,  these  two  authorities  estimate  the  mili- 
tary strength  of  France  at  the  eve  of  the  Revolution  at 
a  figure  very  amazingly  smaller  than  the  total  of  the 
official  statistics.  At  the  same  time,  Guibert,  in  his 
memoir  upon  the  operations  of  the  council  of  war,  which 
was  published  in  1789,  estimates  the  strength  of  the 
army  on  a  peace  footing  at  nearly  one  hundred  and 
eighty  thousand  men.  There  is  very  considerable  dis- 
crepancy between  these  figures.  The  Vicomte  de  Broc, 
in  his  '  Study  of  France  in  the  Ancien  Regime,"  adds 
a  further  variation  by  estimating  the  strength  of  the 
regular  army  in  1789  at  one  hundred  and  seventy  thou- 
sand men,  composed  of  one  hundred  and  twenty-seven 
thousand  infantry,  thirty -five  thousand  cavalry,  and 
eighty-five  thousand  artillery.  But,  however  these  fig- 
ures disagree,  they  at  least  are  sufficient  to  prove  that 
the  French  Monarchy,  at  the  very  moment  before  the 


1789.  MILITARY  STRENGTH   OF  FRANCE.  599 

Revolution,  was,  nominally  at  least,  backed  by  a  deci- 
dedly imposing  military  force.  But  it  was  not  imposing 
when  contrasted  with  the  military  strength  of  other 
European  states.  France  had  to  some  degree  stood 
still,  while  other  states  were  advancing,  and  now,  in 
1789,  Russia,  Prussia,  and  England  were  more  formida- 
ble as  military  powers  than  the  country  which  in  the 
days  of  the  Sun-King  had  claimed  the  distinction  of 
being  the  first  military  power  in  Europe.  At  the  same 
time  the  situation  of  France  was  from  a  diplomatic  point 
of  view  exceedingly  strong  in  1789.  The  treaty  of  1756 
enabled  her  to  count  on  the  alliance  of  Austria,  and  in 
consequence  Tuscany,  of  which  the  emperor  was  grand 
duke;  the  family  compact  assured  her  the  support  of 
Spain,  Parma,  and  Naples;  the  marriages  of  the  two 
princes  of  the  blood  royal,  the  Count  of  Provence  and 
the  Count  d'Artois,  assured  her  of  the  sympathy  of 
Sardinia. 

The  Court  party  had  a  man  after  their  own  heart  to 
do  for  them  the  little  business  of  blotting  out  the  As- 
sembly and,  if  necessary,  of  blotting  out  Paris.  This 
was  Victor  Fran9ois,  second  Duke  de  Broglie.  He  was 
of  Italian  descent — the  family  name  was  Broglio — he 
had  been  a  gallant  soldier  of  the  old  school  in  his  day; 
he  was  now  some  seventy  years  old,  obstinate,  old-fash- 
ioned, wholly  unaware  that  the  world  had  wagged  at 
all  since  the  days  of  his  youth.  A  soldier  was  still  to 
him  a  humane  machine,  able  to  drill,  to  march,  to  shoot 
and  be  shot ;  but  with  no  capacity  for  thinking,  for 
looking  upon  the  world  with  critical  eyes,  for  commit- 
ting the  terrible  crime  of  considering  whether  after  all 
he  was  bound  under  all  conceivable  conditions  to  obey. 
Broglie  felt  sure  that  the  troops  were  to  be  relied  upon. 
He  had  every  confidence  in  himself.  D'Artois  had 


600"  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLl. 

every  confidence  in  him.  The  queen,  unhappily,  had 
every  confidence  in  both.  There  were  plenty  of  foreign 
troops  coming,  daily  drawing  nearer.  Royal-Cravate 
was  at  Charenton,  Reinach  and  Diesbach  at  Sevres, 
Nassau  at  Versailles,  Salis-Samade  at  Issy,  the  hussars 
of  Bercheny  at  the  Military  School;  at  other  stations 
were  Chateauvieux,  Esterhazy,  Rosmer.  There  were 
plenty  of  cannon;  the  plot  was  ripening  to  perfection; 
all  that  was  to  be  done  was  to  dismiss  Necker,  form  a 
good  courtly  ministry,  clap  the  Assembly  under  lock  and 
key,  and  shoot  down  every  one  who  objected.  In  vain 
did  Besenval  point  out  to  bull  -  headed  Broglie  that 
Paris  was  dangerously  excited.  Broglie  would  listen 
to  no  advice.  The  Parisians  were  pitiful  citizens ; 
Royal-Cravate  and  the  like  should  teach  them  a  lesson. 
Necker  himself  seems  not  to  have  participated  at  all 
in  this  new  and  extraordinary  change  in  the  counsels  of 
the  king.  He  declared  positively  that  he  knew  nothing 
of  these  military  movements  till  it  was  impossible  that 
they  could  be  concealed  from  any  one.  "  The  war  min- 
ister," he  says,  "  talked  of  necessary  precaution,  in  con- 
sequence of  the  late  seditious  appearance  at  Paris  and 
Versailles,  and  the  explication  was  natural  enough,  but 
could  no  longer  be  admitted  when  Marshal  Broglie  was 
called  to  court.  I  could  never  ascertain,"  he  adds,  "  to 
what  lengths  their  projects  really  went.  There  were 
secrets  upon  secrets;  and  I  believe  that  even  the  king 
himself  was  far  from  being  acquainted  with  all  of  them. 
What  was  intended  was  probably  to  draw  the  monarch 
on,  as  circumstances  admitted,  to  measures  of  which 
they  durst  not  at  first  have  spoken  to  him.  Time,"  he 
continues,  "  can  alone  unveil  the  mystery  ;  with  me, 
above  all  others,  a  reserve  was  maintained,  and  reason- 
ably, for  my  indisposition  to  everything  of  the  kind 
was  decided." 


1*89.  THE  PEOPLE  SUSPICIOUS.  601 

Necker  must  have  been  somewhat  easily  impressed 
by  the  lack  of  necessary  precautions.  "  The  road,"  says 
Perry,  "between  Paris  and  Versailles  at  this  time  re- 
sembled a  defile  through  which  a  vast  army  was  march- 
ing. Columns  of  troops,  trains  of  artillery,  baggage 
wagons,  and  couriers  with  despatches  occupied  every 
foot  of  the  way.  If  Paris  resembled  a  besieged  city, 
Versailles  did  not  less  picture  a  martial  camp,  in  which 
the  palace  might  be  compared  to  the  tent  of  Darius. 
The  parole  and  countersign  were  changed  sometimes 
twice  or  thrice  a  day,  by  way  of  keeping  the  soldiers  on 
the  alert,  and  all  this  time  the  National  Assembly  had 
upon  its  hand  the  most  important  labors  of  any  legis- 
lators in  any  nation." 

It  was  scarcely  surprising  if  the  people,  and  those  who 
represented  or  who  led  the  people,  began  to  look  with 
suspicion  upon  the  way  in  which  the  Court  party  were 
massing  troops  around  Versailles  and  anigh  to  Paris. 
They  may  well  have  guessed  that  the  desperate  idea 
had  entered  into  the  minds  of  the  Polignacs  and  Brog- 
lies  and  Besenvals  and  Vermonts,  who  represented  the 
royal  as  opposed  to  the  popular  party,  to  sweep  with 
one  wild  stroke  the  new  democratic  opposition  out  of 
existence  befoi'e  the  bayonets  and  the  grapeshot  of  royal 
troops.  Even  the  democratic  leaders  had  no  idea  of  the 
way  in  which  the  troops  were  honeycombed  by  indiffer- 
ence— by  disaffection;  how  little  the  Court  party  could 
really  rely  upon  the  one  arm  to  which  they  trusted  for 
relief  from  the  growing  ascendency  of  the  Third  Estate. 

Yet  there  were  signs  too,  and  significant  signs,  that 
all  was  not  well  for  the  court  in  the  temper  of  the 
troops.  The  soldiers  who  were  in  Paris  had  mixed 
much  with  the  crowd,  had  been  well  treated,  talked  to, 
influenced.  The  Gardes  Frangaises  were  more  and 


602  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  Cu.  XLI. 

more  in  sympathy  with  the  people  daily.  Chatelet  had 
sent  eleven  of  the  guards  to  prison  in  the  Abbaye  for 
what  he  considered  mutinous  conduct.  The  Palais 
Royal  heard  of  it ;  the  Palais  Royal  rose,  broke  open 
the  Abbaye,  and  took  the  prisoners  out  in  triumph. 
Triumphant  Palais  Royal  then  sent  a  deputation  to  the 
National  Assembly.  The  Assembly,  sorely  puzzled  by 
the  turbulence  of  Paris,  discussed  the  matter  for  a  long 
time,  at  last  appealed  to  the  king's  clemency,  and  the 
king,  prudently,  was  clement.  The  guards,  after  re- 
turning to  prison  as  a  formal  sign  of  submission  to  the 
law,  were  set  at  liberty  by  the  king's  order.  This  was 
the  first  popular  triumph ;  it  ought  to  have  taught  the 
court,  but  could  not. 

The  troops  meantime  arrived  in  great  numbers:  Ver- 
sailles assumed  the  aspect  of  a  camp.  Paris  was  encom- 
passed by  various  bodies  of  the  army,  ready  to  besiege 
or  blockade  it  as  the  occasion  might  require.  These 
vast  military  prepai'ations,  announcing  sinister  projects, 
aroused  the  wrath  of  Mirabeau.  When  every  deputy 
feared  to  speak,  in  a  raised  voice,  of  the  concentration 
of  troops,  Mirabeau  startled  them  by  asking,  why  were 
these  troops  assembled  in  the  vicinity  of  the  National 
Assembly,  and  whether  the  majesty  of  the  people  was 
to  be  attacked?  He  demanded  that  one  hundred  depu- 
ties should  instantly  bear  a  petition  to  the  king,  request- 
ing the  withdrawal  of  the  soldiers.  "What,"  said 
Mirabeau  in  the  course  of  his  speech,  "has  been  the 
issue  of  those  declarations  and  of  our  respectful  behav- 
ior? Already  we  are  surrounded  by  a  multitude  of 
soldiers.  More  have  arrived,  are  arriving  every  day. 
They  are  hastening  hither  from  all  quarters.  Thirty- 
five  thousand  men  are  already  cantoned  in  Paris  and 
Versailles,  twenty  thousand  more  are  expected;  they 


1789.  LOUIS  XVI.'S  ARTFUL  ANSWER.  603 

are  followed  by  trains  of  artillery;  spots  are  marked 
out  for  batteries;  every  communication  is  secured, 
every  pass  is  blocked  up;  our  streets,  our  bridges,  our 
public  walks  are  converted  into  military  stations.  Se- 
cret orders,  precipitate  counter-orders,  are  events  of  pub- 
lic notoriety.  In  a  word,  preparations  for  war  strike 
every  eye  and  fill  every  heart  with  indignation." 

Louis  XVI.  answered  the  Assembly  roundly  and  roy- 
ally, as  he  conceived  royalty.  He  declared  that  he 
alone  had  to  judge  the  necessity  of  assembling  or  dis- 
missing troops.  He  assured  the  Assembly  that  those 
assembled  formed  only  a  precautionary  army  to  prevent 
disturbances  and  protect  the  Assembly.  No  person 
could  be  ignorant,  the  king  declared,  of  the  disorders 
and  the  scandalous  scenes  which  had  been  acted  and  re- 
peated at  Paris  and  Versailles,  before  his  eyes  and  be- 
fore the  eyes  of  the  States-General.  It  was  necessary 
that  he  should  make  use  of  the  means  which  were  in  his 
power  to  restore  and  maintain  order  in  the  capital  and 
the  environs.  It  was  one  of  his  principal  duties  to 
watch  over  the  public  safety.  These  were  the  motives 
which  determined  him  to  assemble  the  troops  round 
Pai'is.  If,  however,  he  artfully  suggested,  the  needful 
presence  of  the  troops  in  the  neighborhood  of  Paris  still 
gave  umbrage,  he  was  ready,  at  the  desire  of  the  Assem- 
bly, to  transfer  the  States-General  to  Noyon  or  to  Sois- 
sons.  In  this  case  he  promised  to  go  to  Compiegne,  in 
order  to  maintain  the  communication  which  ought  to 
subsist  between  the  Assembly  and  its  king. 

Paris  was  in  the  greatest  excitement ;  but  the  Assem- 
bly did  not  seem  to  understand  fully  the  danger.  Guil- 
lotin  went  to  Paris  to  impart  a  comfortable  sense  of 
tranquillity  to  the  assembly  of  the  electors.  He  assured 
them  that  everything  was  going  on  excellently,  and  that 


604  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLI. 

Necker  was  stronger  than  ever.  It  would  be  difficult 
to  find  a  more  fantastic  instance  of  false  confidence. 
That  very  day,  whilst  Guillotin  was  speaking,  the  court 
had  struck  the  stroke  which  was  to  herald  its  victory. 


"89.  NECKER  BANISHED. 


005 


CHAPTER  XLII. 

CAMILLE    DESMOULINS. 

ON  July  11,  at  three  o'clock  in  the  afternoon,  Necker 
was  seated  at  table  with  some  guests,  when  a  messenger 
arrived  with  a  letter  from  the  king.  Necker  broke  the 
seals,  and  read  to  himself  with  an  unmoved  countenance 
the  royal  order  that  he  should  at  once,  with  all  possible 
secrecy,  leave  Paris  and  France.  Necker  put  the  letter 
in  his  pocket  and  continued  his  conversation  as  if  noth- 
ing had  happened,  but  as  soon  as  the  dinner  was  over 
he  took  his  wife  aside  and  told  her  of  his  banishment. 
No  thought  of  disobeying  the  royal  order  seems  for  a 
moment  to  have  flashed  across  the  mind  of  Necker.  He 
quietly  ordered  his  carriage,  and  he  and  his  wife,  with- 
out a  single  leave-taking,  without  even  delaying  to 
change  their  clothes  or  make  any  preparations  for  their 
journey,  without  telling  their  daughter  what  had  hap- 
pened, set  off  at  once  on  their  flight  towards  the  fron- 
tier. Next  morning  all  Paris  knew  that  Necker  was 
disgraced,  banished,  gone. 

The  exile  of  Necker  coincides  with  the  first  political 
appearance  of  one  of  the  most  famous  of  the  revolution- 
ary heroes.  Necker's  disgrace  was  Camille  Desmoulins' 
opportunity.  All  Paris  was  raging  with  excitement, 
at  once  furious  and  fearful,  longing  to  do  something 
and  not  knowing  what  to  do.  The  Palais  Royal  was 
as  usual  the  chief  centre  of  public  and  political  excite- 
ment, That  day  the  human  hive  was  thronged  and 


fi06  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLII. 

noisy  with  the  hum  and  buzz  of  angry  voices.  All  the 
material  for  a  popular  movement  raged  and  fumed  there 
under  the  tranquil  July  sky,  under  the  leafy  summer  of 
the  trees,  but  there  seemed  to  be  no  one  to  turn  the  mo- 
ment to  account.  , A  mob  is  a  strange,  helpless,  desper- 
ate thing,  vacillating  between  the  poles  of  do  and  do 
not,  waiting  for  some  voice  to  sum  up  its  secret  mean- 
ing and  direct  it  in  its  course.  So  in  the  summer  heat 
that  great  crowd  weltered,  flowing  and  eddying,  wait- 
ing for  its  voice  and  hearing  none,  or  rather  hearing  a 
babel  of  voices  with  no  unison  in  them.  Suddenly  the 
crowd  found  a  centre  of  attraction.  A  young  man, 
nerved  to  a  kind  of  prophetic  fury  by  the  agitations  of 
the  hout,  had  leaped  upon  one  of  the  tables  of  the  Cafe 
Foy,  and  was  shouting  something  at  the  top  of  his  voice. 
A  man  who  had  something  definite  to  say  was  worth 
listening  to,  and  the  great  crowd  listened  to  the  lean, 
dark-haired  young  man,  who,  with  his  black  eyes  blaz- 
ing with  excitement,  was  shrieking  forth  a  flood  of  pas- 
sionate, impetuous  speech,  and  conquering  in  his  fury 
the  stammer  which  was  slightly  habitual  to  his  tongue. 
"  Citizens,"  he  yelled,  sending  his  voice  as  far  as  he 
could  over  the  sea  of  staring  faces — "  Citizens,  you  know 
that  the  whole  nation  desired  to  keep  its  Necker.  Well, 
I  have  come  from  Versailles — Necker  is  dismissed.  That 
dismissal  is  the  St.  Bartholomew's  bell  of  patriots.  This 
evening  all  the  Swiss  and  German  battalions  will  sally 
from  the  Champ  de  Mars  to  slaughter  us.  There  is  not 
a  moment  to  lose.  We  have  but  one  resource — to  rush 
to  arms  and  to  wear  cockades  whereby  we  may  know 
each  other."  So  Camille  Desmoulins  shouted,  bubbling 
with  revolutionary  thoughts,  almost  choking  with  the 
torrent  of  his  words,  wildly  incoherent,  but  pregnant 
with  purpose.  The  answering  yell  with  which  the 


1789.  TO  ARMS. 


607 


crowd  greeted  his  proposal  told  him  that  he  had  struck 
the  popular  thought.  "What  colors  shall  we  wear  to 
rally  by  ?"  he  went  on.  "  Will  you  wear  green,  the 
color  of  hope,  or  the  blue  of  Cincinnatus,  color  of  the 
liberty  of  America,  and  of  democracy?"  "Green, 
green,"  the  crowd  shout  uproariously.  Camille  pinned 
a  green  ribbon  to  his  hat,  and  a  thousand  hands,  tearing 
at  the  boughs  of  the  trees,  fashioned  the  symbols  of 
cockades  from  their  green  leaves.  Then  Camille,  still 
standing  on  his  table,  still  dominating  with  his  wild 
genius  the  swaying  mass,  green  now  with  the  livery  of 
spring,  produced  two  pistols  and  held  them  high  in  the 
air.  "  My  friends,"  he  cried,  "  the  police  are  here,  they 
are  watching  me,  they  are  playing  the  spy  on  me.  Very 
well,  it  is  I,  I,  who  call  my  brothers  to  liberty.  But  I 
will  not  fall  living  into  their  power.  Let  all  good  citi- 
zens do  as  I  do.  To  arms !"  A  deafening  shout  of 
"  To  arms !"  answered  this  appeal.  Camille,  the  hero  of 
the  hour,  the  leader  of  the  mob,  leaped  from  his  table 
and  led  his  little  army  into  the  streets.  Like  a  living 
sea  the  mob  of  the  Palais  Royal  rushed  through  the 
Boulevards,  growing  larger  at  every  street,  at  every  cor- 
ner, at  every  house.  Paris  was  in  their  hands.  They 
forced  the  theatres  to  close  as  a  tribute  to  the  banished 
Necker;  they  seized  all  the  busts  of  Necker  and  of  Or- 
leans that  they  could  find  in  the  shop  of  sculptor  Cur- 
tius,  and  carried  them,  veiled  in  black,  in  Roman  tri- 
umph through  the  streets.  Camille  Desmoulins  had 
made  his  first  bid  for  fame. 

The  little  Picard  town  of  Guise  in  the  kindly  Ver- 
mandois  was  a  pleasant  place  enough  for  an  eager,  im- 
pressionable boy  to  be  born  in,  to  remember  as  the  cradle 
of  his  youth.  The  undulating  plains  of  the  Aisne  de- 
partment are  fat  and  fruitful ;  in  the  richer  lands  along 


608  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLII. 

the  Oise  the  farmers  of  Vervins  raise  good  crops  of 
wheat  and  rye  and  barley,  of  oats  and  hemp,  of  flax  and 
hops.  The  little  river  Aisne,  the  larger  Sorame,  water 
its  green  meadows,  reflect  the  milky  blueness  of  its 
skies.  It  may  please  us,  as  it  pleases  M.  Jules  Claretie 
in  his  charming  volume,  to  imagine  the  boy  Camille 
wandering  by  Aisne's  waters,  a  book  in  his  hands,  read- 
ing and  dreaming  ;  or  climbing  the  slope  which  led  to 
the  citadel,  pausing  for  a  moment  to  hearken  to  some 
burst  of  music  coming  from  the  church,  reciting  some 
verses  of  Voltaire  in  front  of  the  chapel,  murmuring 
some  mighty  lines  of  Tacitus  in  the  stern  face  of  the 
citadel. 

Guise  itself  was  a  fortified  town  of  the  third  class, 
with  frowning  walls  that  still  seemed  formidable  in  the 
days  of  Camille  Desmoulins'  boyhood,  but  which  would 
be  as  useful  as  so  much  brown  paper  against  modern 
artillery.  The  town  itself  has  an  old-world  air  about  it, 
not  indeed  the  old  world  of  the  fifteenth  or  sixteenth 
century,  but  the  old  world  of  the  days  when  the  Rev- 
olution was  dawning.  It  was  a  hard-working,  patient, 
industrious,  dignified  little  town,  and  it  never  bore  a 
stranger  child  than  Camille  Desmoulins,  the  "gamin  de 
genie,"  the  "  corner-boy  of  genius  "  as  we  may  perhaps 
best  translate  the  term.  He  was  born  in  the  Street  of 
the  Greafc  Bridge,  hard  by  the  Place  of  Arms,  on  March 
2,  1760.  His  father,  Jean  Benoist  Nicolas  Desmoulins, 
was  a  country  lawyer,  by  no  means  wealthy,  who  had 
risen  to  the  office  of  "lieutenant-general  civil  et  criminel 
au  bailliage  de  Guise;"  his  mother  was  Marie  Magde- 
leine  Godart,  of  Wiege  village.  Camille  was  the  eldest 
son  ;  there  were  two  other  brothers  who  entered  the 
army,  and  two  sisters,  of  whom  one  entered  the  Church 
and  the  other  lived  on  until  1838.  It  is  curious  to  think 


1789.  TWO   FRIENDS. 


609 


of  a  sister  of  our  strange,  gifted,  wild  Camille  living  on 
tranquilly  into  an  epoch  so  different  from  that  in  which 
her  brother  for  a  while  buffeted  so  stoutly  with  destiny. 

It  was  the  elder  Desmoulins'  ambition  to  educate  his 
son  largely,  to  make  him  a  famous  lawyer,  to  see  in  him 
the  realization  of  the  dream  that  old  Desmoulins  had 
long  ago  put  aside  for  himself,  the  dream  of  being  an 
advocate  at  the  Parliament  of  Paris.  It  did  not  at  first 
appear  as  if  this  revived  dream  were  any  too  likely  to 
be  realized.  The  studies  essential  for  such  a  scheme, 
for  the  desired  success,  were  not  for  all  comers  ;  they 
cost  money,  and  the  elder  Desmoulins  had  very  little 
money.  But  luckily — or  unluckily,  it  is  hard  to  say 
which — one  of  those  useful  relatives  who  seem  most  ap- 
propriate in  the  domain  of  comedy  came  to  the  rescue. 
M.  de  Viefville  des  Essarts,  who  had  formerly  been  an 
advocate  of  the  Paris  Parliament,  and  who  was  yet  in 
the  fulness  of  time  to  be  Yermandois  deputy  to  the 
States-General,  obtained  for  Camille  a  purse  at  the  Col- 
lege of  Louis  le  Grand.  Here  Camille  first  fed  that  ex- 
traordinary love  for  knowledge  which  was  the  master 
passion  of  his  youth  ;  here  he  first  tasted  the  triumphs 
of  success  ;  here  he  first  sucked  the  milk  of  an  ideal  re- 
publicanism ;  here  he  first  met,  and  made  a  friend  of, 
Maximilien  Robespierre. 

The  lovers  of  an  amusing  and  not  perhaps  wholly 
profitless  speculation  might  please  their  thoughts  by 
fancying  what  our  wild  Camille's  future  might  have 
been  if  only  that  useful  relative,  \riefville  des  Essarts, 
had  not  turned  up  in  the  nick  of  time  with  his  purse  at 
Louis  le  Grand.  Would  the  wild  humors  which  at  times 
hung  about  him,  as  the  fogs  hung  about  the  marshy 
places  of  the  Vermandois  where  he  was  born,  have  got 
the  better  of  him  ;  would  he  have  shocked  the  little 
I.— 39 


610  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLII. 

tranquil  town  more  than  he  did,  or  served  as  a  soldier 
like  his  kin,  or  settled  down  after  the  solid  patient  pat- 
tern of  his  sire,  and  made  an  excellent  citizen  ?  Slug- 
gish he  could  scarcely  have  ever  been  ;  the  wild  blood 
that  burned  in  him  would  have  ever  and  ever  said  nay 
to  that  ;  but  he  might  have  tempered  it  more  to  the 
grave  Guise  Music.  He  might — but  Viefville  des  Es- 
sarts  did  turn  up  ;  Camille  went  to  Paris,  and  there  is 
an  end  to  the  speculations. 

In  Paris  Camille  worked  hard,  spurred  by  his  inde- 
fatigable thirst  for  knowledge.  Every  healthy  child, 
says  Emerson,  is  a  Greek  or  a  Roman.  This  young 
student  Camille  was  devoutly,  desperately  Roman.  The 
glory  of  the  Roman  Republic  possessed  his  spirit  with 
a  kind  of  sibylline  enthusiasm.  The  mighty  figures  of 
a  high  antique  republicanism  haunted  his  days  and 
nights.  The  sonorous  periods  of  Cicero  wrhipped  his 
hot  blood  to  fury  ;  in  the  gloomy  grandeur  of  Tacitus, 
in  the  epic  irony  of  Lucan,  he  found  his  hatred  of  tyr- 
anny interpreted  for  him  with  the  eloquence  of  the 
gods.  As  dear  to  him  as  the  writings  of  the  classic  au- 
thors themselves  was  a  book  now  well-nigh  forgotten, 
then  very  famous,  the  "Revolutions  Romaines"  of  the 
Abbe  Vertot.  In  its  pages  he  looked  upon  the  pale 
phantom  of  stern  Roman  virtues,  and  seemed  to  enter 
into  spiritual  brotherhood  with  a  Brutus  or  a  Gracchus, 
a  Marius  or  a  Cato. 

Camille  Desmoulins  lives  for  us  in  the  wonderful 
portrait  by  Rouillard  in  the  Versailles  museum.  The 
dark  skin,  the  dark  hair,  the  dark,  burning  eyes,  give 
something  almost  of  a  gypsy  aspect  to  the  face.  It  is 
the  face  of  a  child  of  genius,  wayward,  erring,  brilliant, 
fantastic,  the  face  of  an  artist,  a  visionary,  a  dreamer  of 
dreams.  No  more  attractive  face  looks  out  upon  us 


1789.  DESMOULINS'  LUCILE.  611 

from  the  gallery  of  the  past,  no  more  attractive  person- 
ality passes  across  the  stage  of  the  Revolution.  His 
love  for  the  beautiful  Lucile  is  one  of  the  most  romantic 
stories  in  history  that  is  so  often  romantic  ;  among  all 
the  women  of  the  revolutionary  period  her  gracious  fig- 
ure is  the  fondest  and  the  fairest. 


012  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIII. 


CHAPTER  XLIII. 

TWELFTH    AND   THIRTEENTH    OP    JULY. 

ON  that  same  day  a  serious  collision  occurred  be- 
tween the  people  and  the  troops.  According  to  a  pict- 
uresque contemporary  account  the  Prince  de  Lambesc, 
with  a  body  of  German  cavalry,  rode  into  the  Place 
Louis  Quinze,  a  spacious  square,  and,  with  a  menacing 
attitude,  announced  by  the  mouth  of  two  of  his  trum- 
peters that  he  had  orders  to  disperse  all  groups  of  citi- 
zens who  might  be  assembled  on  the  place,  or  in  the 
gardens  of  the  Tuileries.  An  elderly  man  answered  one 
of  the  heralds  in  a  manner  which  occasioned  the  trum- 
peter to  ride  back  to  the  prince,  to  tell  him  that  he  had 
been  insulted  by  a  citizen  to  whom  he  had  communicated 
his  highness's  pleasure.  On  this  the  prince,  in  a  pas- 
sion, galloped  up  to  the  offending  but  unarmed  old 
man,  riding  over  a  woman,  and  striking  the  object  of 
his  revenge  with  his  drawn  sword.  The  circumstance, 
slight  as  it  may  appear  in  itself,  was  regarded  as  an  at- 
tack upon  the  citizens  of  Paris  by  the  military;  and  the 
cry  of,  "  To  arms  !  to  arms  !"  reverberated  from  street 
to  street,  like  the  repeated  claps  of  thunder  amid  sur- 
rounding hills  and  woods.  The  whole  city  was  in  con- 
fusion in  an  instant ;  a  mixture  of  rage  and  dismay  was 
on  every  countenance.  A  blow  had  been  struck,  which 
was  considered  as  an  incentive  to  a  quarrel,  that  coer- 
cive measures  of  the  military  might  be  better  justified. 
A  battle  must  be  fought.  The  play-houses,  the  churches, 


1789.  LAMBESC. 


613 


and  even  the  shops  were  all  shut  up  ;  workmen  ran  out 
of  their  manufactories  with  their  tools  and  implements 
of  trade  in  their  hands  as  weapons  of  attack  or  defence, 
as  exigence  might  require. 

It  is  not  easy  to  be  sure  of  the  events  of  that  strange 
day.  It  seems  pretty  certain,  however,  that  the  first 
serious  struggle  took  place  on  the  Place  Vendome,  where 
the  bust-bearing  mob  came  against  a  detachment  of 
Royal -Allemand  and  a  detachment  of  Dragons -Lor- 
raine. The  soldiers  charged  the  crowd,  killing  and 
wounding  ;  the  crowd,  instead  of  flying,  held  its  own, 
and  forced  the  troops  back  to  the  Place  Louis  Quinze. 
It  is  said  that  in  the  scuffle  a  Savoyard  who  was  carry- 
ing the  bust  of  Orleans  was  wounded  by  a  bayonet- 
thrust,  and  a  young  man  who  was  carrying  the  bust  of 
Necker  was  shot  dead.  The  sight  of  the  retreating 
soldiers  startled  the  Prince  de  Lambesc.  With  some 
confused  idea  of  securing  a  better  military  position 
he  charged  into  the  Tuileries  Gardens,  upsetting  in 
his  wild  ride  a  peaceful  citizen.  The  boom  of  cannon 
was  heard.  Startled  citizens  declared  that  this  was 
the  signal  to  the  legionaries  massed  round  Paris  to 
fall  upon  the  city.  The  alarm  spread  in  all  directions 
and  awoke  the  most  warlike  spirit.  The  court  had 
expected  some  such  disturbance  to  arise  ;  had  even 
counted  upon  it  for  the  furtherance  of  the  courtly  plan. 
There  were  troops  massed  in  the  Champ  de  Mars,  wait- 
ing for  just  such  an  excuse  of  revolt  as  this  to  do  their 
work.  But  the  courtly  plan  did  not  succeed.  Those 
soldiers  in  the  Champ  de  Mars  were  as  valueless  as  the 
painted  monsters  of  a  Chinese  army. 

The  French  Guards  now  made  their  momentous  irrup- 
tion in  history.  They  had  been  showing  a  mutinous 
spirit  for  some  time.  They  were  as  bitterly  dissat- 


614  THE   FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIII. 

isfied  with  their  present  commander,  Chatelet,  as  they 
had  been  devoted  to  his  predecessor,  Marshal  Biron, 
who  had  managed  them  with  great  skill,  and  had  much 
increased  their  efficiency.  Chatelet  was  a  man  of 
a  martinet  spirit,  who  made  himself  very  unpopular 
with  the  men  under  his  command,  altering  and  med- 
dling where  alteration  and  meddling  had  best  been  left 
alone.  But  even  their  dislike  did  not  on  this  very  day 
on  which  they  renounced  their  allegiance  prevent  them 
from  saving  Chatelet's  life  from  the  fury  of  the  mob. 
The  fury  of  the  mob,  the  courage  of  the  mob,  the  suc- 
cess of  the  mob,  were  largely  aided  by  the  action  that 
the  French  Guards  took  on  this  memorable  day.  They 
now  broke  loose,  advanced  at  quick  time  and  with  fixed 
bayonets  to  the  Place  Louis  Quinze,  and  took  their  stand 
between  the  Tuileries  and  the  Champs  Elysees,  and 
drew  up  in  order  of  battle  against  the  German  regi- 
ment of  the  Royal-Allemand.  Now  was  the  time  to 
make  use  of  those  forces  stationed  in  the  Champ  de 
Mars.  But  somehow  those  forces  showed  an  unex- 
pected languor,  an  unexpected  dilatoriness.  The  hours 
were  driving  on  ;  evening  was  beginning  to  fall  before 
the  Swiss  could  be  fairly  got  to  the  scene  of  disturb- 
ance. As  they  came  up  they  were  confronted  by  the 
Guards  in  the  Champs  Elysees  with  levelled  muskets. 
The  Swiss  halted,  and  refused  to  fire.  The  officers  had 
no  other  alternative  but  to  lead  their  soldiers  back  to 
the  Champ  de  Mars. 

While  all  this  wild  work  was  going  on,  Paris  was  not 
entirely  left  without  guidance.  The  pale  phantoms  of 
municipal  power  had  indeed  no  influence,  but  the  elec- 
tors were  still  an  existing  organized  body,  and  in  this 
moment  of  trial  they  took  the  helm  judiciously.  Very 
difficult  it  was  to  take  the  helm.  The  position  of  the 


1789.  THE  TOWN  HALL. 


615 


electors  was  exceedingly  perplexing.  The  Hotel  de 
Ville,  where  they  assembled,  was  flooded  by  a  tumultu- 
ous mob,  shrieking  for  arms,  vociferating  wild  counsels, 
raging  with  incoherent  threats.  It  was  a  trying  time  for 
the  electors,  into  whose  hands  a  power  to  which  they 
made  no  pretence  was  suddenly  thrust.  Loyal  subjects 
of  their  king,  they  naturally  hesitated  to  commit  them- 
selves to  acts  the  end  of  which  seemed  so  uncertain,  or 
to  assume  an  authority  to  which  they  had  no  legal 
right.  When  they  did  decide  to  take  up  the  authority, 
it  was  not  so  easy  to  get  it  either  recognized  or  obeyed. 
They  had  to  deal  not  only  with  an  insurgent  patriotism; 
they  had  to  deal  too  with  those  who,  caring  nothing  for 
patriotism,  saw  in  the  general  disturbance  their  chance 
to  profit.  All  the  rogues,  the  vagabonds,  the  destitute, 
the  desperate,  the  evilly  disposed  from  inclination,  and 
the  evilly  disposed  from  despair,  were  out  and  abroad, 
and  the  electors  were  at  their  wits'  end  to  keep  them  in 
check  and  preserve  the  order  of  the  city. 

Moleville  paints  a  moving  picture  of  the  disorder, 
fermentation,  and  alarm  that  prevailed  in  the  capital 
during  this  fearful  day.  A  city  taken  by  storm  and 
delivered  up  to  the  soldiers'  fury  could  not  present  a 
more  dreadful  sight.  Detachments  of  cavalry  and 
dragoons  made  their  way  through  different  parts  of  the 
town  at  full  gallop  to  the  posts  assigned  them.  Trains 
of  artillery  rolled  over  the  pavement  with  a  monstrous 
noise.  Bands  of  ill-armed  ruffians  and  women,  drunk 
with  brandy,  ran  through  the  streets  like  furies,  break- 
ing the  shops  open,  and  spreading  terror  everywhere  by 
their  bowlings,  mingled  with  frequent  reports  from 
guns  or  pistols  fired  in  the  air.  Many  of  the  barriers 
were  on  fire.  Thousands  of  smugglers  took  advantage 
of  the  tumult  to  hurry  in  their  goods.  The  alarm-bell 


616  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  On.  XLttl 

was  ringing  in  almost  all  the  churches.  A  great  part 
of  the  citizens  shut  themselves  up  at  home,  loading 
their  guns  and  burying  their  money,  papers,  and  valua- 
ble effects  in  cellars  and  gardens.  During  the  night 
the  town  was  paraded  by  numerous  patrols  of  citizens 
of  every  class,  and  even  of  both  sexes;  for  many  women 
were  seen  on  that  mad  night  with  muskets  or  pikes 
upon  their  shoulders.  Such  was  Paris — without  courts  of 
justice,  without  police,  without  a  guard — at  the  mercy 
of  one  hundred  thousand  men,  who  were  wandering 
wildly  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  and  for  the  most 
part  wanting  bread.  It  believed  itself  on  the  point  of 
being  besieged  from  without  and  pillaged  from  within. 
It  believed  that  twenty-five  thousand  soldiers  were 
posted  around  to  blockade  it  and  cut  off  all  supplies  of 
provisions,  and  that  it  would  be  a  prey  to  a  starving 
populace. 

If  the  departure  of  Necker  threw  the  capital  into  this 
state  of  excitement,  it  had  no  less  effect  at  Versailles 
and  in  the  Assembly.  The  deputies  went  early  in  the 
morning  of  July  13  to  the  Hall  of  the  States.  Mounier 
spoke  against  the  dismissal  of  the  ministers.  Lally- 
Tollendal  delivered  a  lengthy  eulogy  upon  Necker,  and 
joined  Mounier  in  calling  upon  the  king  to  recall  the 
displaced  ministers.  A  deputy  of  the  nobles,  M.  cle 
Virieu,  even  proposed  to  confirm  the  resolutions  of  June 
17  by  a  new  oath.  M.  de  Clermont-Tonnerre  opposed 
this  as  useless  ;  and,  recalling  the  obligations  already 
taken  by  the  Assembly,  exclaimed,  "  We  will  have  the 
constitution  or  we  will  perish  !"  The  discussion  had 
already  lasted  long,  when  Guillotin  arrived  from  Paris 
with  a  petition  entreating  the  Assembly  to  aid  in  estab- 
lishing a  citizen  guard.  Guillotin  gave  a  terrible  de- 
scription of  the  crisis  in  Paris.  The  Assembly  voted 


1789.  THE  FEARLESS  ASSEMBLY  617 

two  deputations,  one  to  the  king,  the  other  to  the  city. 
That  to  the  king  represented  to  him  the  disturbances 
of  the  capital,  and  begged  him  to  direct  the  removal  of 
the  troops,  and  authorize  the  establishment  of  civic 
guards.  The  deputation  to  Paris  was  only  to  be  sent 
if  the  king  consented  to  the  request  of  the  Assembly. 

The  king  replied  that  he  could  make  no  alterations 
in  the  measures  he  had  taken,  that  he  could  not  sanction 
a  civic  guard,  that  he  was  the  only  judge  of  what  should 
be  done,  and  that  the  presence  of  the  deputies  at  Paris 
could  do  no  good.  The  indignant  Assembly  replied  to  the 
royal  refusal  by  a  series  of  stout-hearted  and  significant 
declarations.  It  announced  that  M.  Necker  bore  with  him 
the  regret  of  the  nation.  It  insisted  on  the  removal  of  the 
troops.  It  reiterated  its  assertion  that  no  intermediary 
could  exist  between  the  king  and  the  National  Assem- 
bly. It  declared  that  the  ministers  and  the  civil  and 
military  agents  of  authority  were  responsible  for  any 
act  contrary  to  the  rights  of  the  nation  and  the  decrees 
of  the  Assembly.  It  maintained  that  not  only  the  min- 
isters, but  the  king's  counsellors,  of  whatever  rank  they 
might  be,  were  personally  responsible  for  the  present 
misfortunes.  It  declared  that,  as  the  public  debt  had 
been  placed  under  the  safeguard  of  the  honor  and  the 
loyalty  of  the  French  people,  and  as  the  nation  did  not 
refuse  to  pay  the  interest  thereon,  that  no  power  had 
the  right  to  pronounce  the  infamous  word  "  bankruptcy," 
and  no  power  had  the  right  to  be  wanting  to  the  public 
faith  under  whatever  form  and  denomination  it  might  be. 

After  these  strong  and  prudent  measures  the  Assem- 
bly, to  preserve  its  members  from  all  personal  violence, 
declared  itself  permanent,  and  named  M.  de  Lafayette 
vice-president,  in  order  to  relieve  the  respected  Arch- 
bishop of  Vienne,  whose  age  incapacitated  him  from 


618  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLII1. 

sitting  day  and  night.  The  Assembly  greatly  feared 
that  the  court  might  seize  upon  its  archives.  On  the 
preceding  Sunday  evening  Gregoire,  one  of  the  secreta- 
ries, had  folded  up,  sealed,  and  hidden  all  the  papers 
in  a  house  at  Versailles.  On  Monday  he  presided 
for  the  time,  and  sustained  by  his  courage  the  weak- 
hearted  by  reminding  them  of  the  Tennis  Court,  and 
the  words  of  the  Roman,  "  Fearless  amid  the  crash  of 
worlds." 

When  the  morning  of  July  13  dawned  Paris  was 
seething  in  excitement.  The  electors  in  permanent 
committee  formally  called  upon  Flesselles,  the  provost 
of  the  merchants,  to  organize  the  Paris  militia,  and  the 
permanent  committee  rapidly  drew  up  a  proclamation, 
which  was  posted  upon  the  door  of  the  Hotel  de  Ville, 
authorizing  the  establishment  of  a  militia.  Many  of  the 
provincial  towns  possessed  a  militia,  and  the  democratic 
leaders  had  been  eagerly  desirous  of  establishing  one  in 
Paris,  where  it  might  prove  of  the  most  inestimable  ser- 
vice to  them.  The  militia  was  to  consist  of  forty-eight 
thousand  citizens,  called  up  by  registry  of  two  hundred 
men  each  day  for  three  or  four  days  in  each  of  the  sixty 
districts  of  Paris.  These  sixty  districts  were  to  form 
sixteen  legions,  twelve  of  which  were  to  form  four  bat- 
talions, and  the  other  four  three  battalions  only,  named 
after  the  quarters  of  the  city  from  which  they  were 
raised.  Each  battalion  was  to  consist  of  four  companies. 
Each  company  was  to  consist  of  two  hundred  men. 
Every  member  of  the  new  force  was  to  wear  a  cockade 
composed  of  the  colors  of  the  city — red  and  blue.  The 
staff  officers  were  to  have  a  seat  in  the  permanent  com- 
mittee. The  arms  given  to  each  man  were  to  be  re- 
turned to  the  officers  at  the  end  of  the  service.  In  de- 
fault of  this  the  officers  were  to  be  answerable  for  the 


1789.  "TO  THE   LANTERN!" 


619 


weapons.     The  officers  were  to  be  appointed  by  the  per- 
manent committee. 

The  city  certainly  responded  nobly  to  the  demand  of 
the  permanent  committee.  It  has  been  said  that  the 
militia  was  formed  almost  as  soon  as  the  fable  described 
the  army  of  Cadmus  to  assemble.  From  all  the  ends 
of  Paris  honest  burgesses  streamed  to  the  various  cen- 
tres of  the  sixty  districts.  It  is  written  that  at  noon 
about  eighteen  thousand  had  been  mustered,  and  called 
over  on  the  Place  de  Greve,  before  the  town-house,  with 
at  least  three  times  their  number  of  less-regular  armed 
citizens  at  their  backs,  who  seemed  ready  to  hazard,  or 
even  lose,  their  lives  at  the  first  word  of  command. 
There  were,  moreover,  a  choice  band  of  volunteers, 
clothed  and  paid  by  a  society  of  patriots,  on  whom  the 
greatest  dependence  was  placed.  Thousands  of  citizens, 
totally  unaccustomed  to  arms,  were  soon  seen  armed  at 
all  points  and  wearing  the  red-and-blue  cockade  of  the 
new  army.  The  mass  of  the  people  now  showed  them- 
selves the  enemies  of  pillage.  They  respected  property, 
only  took  arms,  and  themselves  checked  robbery.  Some 
mischief,  indeed,  took  place.  The  priests  of  the  house 
of  the  congregation  of  St.  Lazarus  were  found  by  the 
arms-seeking  mob  to  have  corn  in  their  granaries.  The 
mob,  with  some  queer,  angry  memory  of  famine  in  their 
minds,  raged  over  the  discovery,  ravaged  the  place,  and 
stupefied  themselves  with  the  wine  in  the  cellars.  But, 
on  the  whole,  order  was  fairly  well  maintained.  Small 
groups  of  thieves  committing  robberies  on  their  own 
account  were  promptly  haled  to  the  Place  de  Greve,  the 
common  place  of  execution,  and  hanged  by  the  ropes 
which  were  used  to  fasten  the  lanterns.  It  was  this 
wild  justice  which  first  found  voice  for  that  terrible  cry 
of  "  A  la  lanterne  /"  which  was  yet  to  ring  so  often  and 


620  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIII. 

so  ominously  through  the  streets  of  the  transformed 
city. 

It  was  high  time  for  Paris  to  arm  itself.  Every  mo- 
ment during  the  early  hours  of  that  dreadful  day  Paris 
expected  to  see  the  troops  of  the  king  enter  the  menaced 
city.  Every  one  was  shrieking  for  arms;  every  one  was 
eager  to  shoulder  a  musket  or  brandish  a  pike,  or,  for 
that  matter,  to  handle  some  mace,  some  battle-axe,  or 
two-handed  sword,  long  out  of  fashion,  the  rusted  prop- 
erty of  vanished  knights  whose  bones  were  dust  and 
whose  souls  are  with  the  saints,  we  trust.  It  was  easier 
to  shriek  for  arms  than  to  get  arms.  The  bewildered 
committee  in  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  badgered  for  arms, 
were  at  a  loss  what  to  answer.  They  could  only  say 
that  if  the  town  had  any  they  could  only  be  obtained 
through  the  provost.  The  mob  replied  by  bidding  them 
send  for  the  provost  immediately. 

The  provost,  Flesselles,  was  on  that  day  summoned  to 
Versailles  by  the  king,  and  to  the  Hotel  de  Ville  by  the 
people.  He  was  a  new  man,  who  had  only  received  the 
office  some  few  weeks  before.  He  was  a  weak  man,  whol- 
ly unequal  to  the  gravity  of  the  situation.  He  seems  to 
have  thought  that  a  revolution  could  be  allayed  with 
rose-water;  that  glib  phrases,  unctuous  manners,  could 
soothe  down  the  difficulty.  It  would  have  been  better 
for  himself  if  he  had  gone  to  Versailles.  Possibly  he 
was  afraid  to  refuse  the  summons  of  the  crowd.  Pos- 
sibly he  thought  he  could  better  serve  the  king  at  Paris. 
He  went  to  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  and  made  liberal  prom- 
ises :  so  many  thousand  muskets  that  day ;  so  many  more 
hereafter.  He  said  he  had  got  a  promise  from  a  Charle- 
ville  gunsmith.  In  the  evening  Flesselles'  chests  of 
arms  were  delivered  at  the  Hotel  de  Ville.  When  they 
were  opened,  however,  they  were  found  to  be  filled  with 


1789.  ARMS,  ARMS!  621 

old  rags.  Naturally  the  multitude  raged  with  a  great 
rage  with  the  provost.  Flesselles  declared  that  he  had 
been  himself  deceived.  To  quiet  the  mob  he  sent  them 
to  the  Carthusian  monastery,  promising  them  that  they 
would  find  arms  there.  The  astounded  monks  received 
the  raging  crowd,  took  them  all  over  the  monastery,  and 
satisfied  them  that  they  had  not  as  much  as  a  gun  to 
shoot  a  crow  with. 

The  people,  more  irritated  than  ever,  returned  with 
cries  of  treachery.  To  pacify  them,  the  electors  author- 
ized the  districts  to  manufacture  fifty  thousand  pikes. 
They  were  forged  with  amazing  rapidity,  but  the  great- 
est speed  seemed  too  slow  for  such  an  hour.  The  impa- 
tient masses  thought  of  the  Garde  Meuble  on  the  Place 
Louis  Quinze.  There  were  weapons  there  indeed,  but 
of  a  venerable  type — old  swords,  old  halberts,  old  cui- 
rasses. Such  as  they  were,  they  served  the  turn  of  the 
impatient  mob,  who  speedily  distributed  to  hundreds  of 
eager  hands  weapons  that  belonged  to  the  history  of 
France,  weapons  that  were  now  to  play  a  part  in  more 
momentous  history.  Powder  destined  for  Versailles  was 
coming  down  the  Seine  in  boats ;  this  was  taken  posses- 
sion of  and  distributed  by  an  elector  at  the  grave  risk 
of  his  life.  The  cannoneers  of  the  Gardes  Fran9aises 
brought  into  the  city  to  swell  the  general  armament  a 
train  of  their  artillery,  which  they  had  taken  from  the 
Gros  Caillou  Hospital.  The  people  then  bethought  them 
of  the  grand  store  of  guns  at  the  Invalides.  The  depu- 
ties of  one  district  went,  the  same  evening,  to  Besenval, 
the  commandant,  and  Sombreuil,  the  governor  of  the 
Hotel.  Besenval  promised  to  write  to  Versailles  about 
it.  Write  he  did  to  De  Broglie,  but  he  received  no  an- 
swer. Next  morning,  at  seven  o'clock,  the  mob,  headed 
by  Ethis  de  Corny,  of  the  permanent  committee,  made 


622  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIII. 

a  more  decided  demand,  swept  into  the  place,  and  seized 
the  store  of  weapons.     Paris  was  bristling  with  steel. 

That  night  of  July  13  was  one  of  the  strangest  Paris 
had  ever  seen.  All  night  long  its  streets  echoed  to  the 
tramping  of  feet  of  patrols ;  all  night  the  air  rang  with 
the  clink  of  hammer  on  anvil  where  men  were  forging 
pikes.  All  night  citizen  soldiers,  eccentrically  armed 
and  eccentrically  drilled,  held  themselves  in  readiness 
to  fight.  All  night  the  permanent  committee  held 
the  sceptre  of  authority  at  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  where 
Moreau  de  Saint-Mery  had  once  to  threaten  menacing 
rapscallions  with  a  blowing-up  of  the  whole  building 
with  gunpowder  before  he  could  reduce  them  to  quiet. 
All  night  the  Place  de  Greve  was  choked  with  cannon 
and  piles  of  arms.  All  night  good  patriots  helped  the 
feeble  civic  illumination  by  hanging  lamps  from  their 
windows.  TLe  strangest  night  Paris  had  ever  seen 
came  and  wen*  and  heralded  the  strangest  day. 


1789.  THE  FOURTEENTH   OF  JULY. 


623 


CHAPTER  XLIV. 

THE    BASTILLE. 

WHEN  the  morning  of  July  14  dawned,  probably  no- 
body in  all  that  distracted,  desperately  heroic  Paris 
dreamed  that  the  light  of  one  of  the  most  famous  days 
in  the  history  of  mankind  was  being  shed  upon  the 
world.  Nobody  probably  dreamed  that  the  fourteenth 
of  July  would  be  remembered  through  generation  after 
generation  as  a  sacred  day  of  liberty.  Not  even  fiery 
young  Camille  Desmoulins,  with  his  stutter  and  his 
patriotism,  who  occupied  himself  on  July  14  by  arming 
himself  with  a  musket  and  a  bayonet,  "  quite  new,"  at 
the  captured  Invalides.  Not  Doctor  Marat,  concerned 
no  longer  with  light  and  electricity,  but  busy  with 
graver  things,  and  revolving,  like  the  pious  ^Eneas,  many 
cares  in  his  mind.  Not  the  Sieur  Santerre,  first  of 
French  brewers  to  employ  coke  in  the  roasting  of  malt, 
and  of  whom  it  shall  yet  be  said,  inaccurately,  that  he 
ordered  drums  to  beat  to  drown  the  dying  speech  of  a 
king.  There  were  plenty  of  men  in  Paris  that  day  who 
were  prepared  to  make  a  bold  stand  for  freedom,  and 
to  die  with  arms  in  their  hands,  rather  than  submit  to 
the  menaces  of  a  court  prompted  by  Polignacs,  and 
buttressed  by  Royal  -  Allemands  ;  but  there  was  no 
prophet  to  see  that  this  particular  day  was  to  prove 
the  day  of  days,  and  all  through  the  fall  of  a  prison. 

The  mind's  eye,  cleared  and  strengthened  by  much 
study  of  old  prints,  can  construct  for  itself  a  sufficient 


6^4  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

picture  of  the  Bastille  as  it  was.  When  the  mob  came 
surging  up  from  Saint- Antoine  on  that  memorable  day, 
they  saw  for  almost  the  last  time  the  sight  which  had 
been  familiar  to  Saint- Antoine  for  generations  and  gen- 
erations. The  gray,  gaunt,  oblong  block,  with  its  eight 
tall  towers  or  buttresses,  one  at  each  angle,  and  two 
between  on  each  of  the  longer  sides,  had  cast  its  daily 
shadow  over  Paris  for  nigh  four  hundred  years.  Etienne 
Marcel,  provost  of  the  merchants,  started  it  in  1357, 
when  France  was  still  reeling  from  the  defeat  at  Poic- 
tiers,  and  luckless  John  lay  in  the  hands  of  his  enemies. 
In  those  days  it  consisted  only  of  a  fortified  gate.  It 
was  made  into  a  fortress  by  Hugues  Aubriot,  provost 
of  Paris,  in  1370,  under  Charles  V.  Hugues  Aubriot 
was  one  of  the  first  to  experience  the  capabilities  of  his 
Bastille  as  a  prison.  He  was  accused  of  being  over- 
much inclined  to  the  Jews,  of  being  overmuch  inclined 
to  Jewesses,  of  being  at  once  a  roisterer  and  a  heretic. 
He  was  condemned  to  be  burned  alive,  but  the  king's 
clemency  saved  him,  and  substituted  imprisonment  on 
bread  and  water  for  life.  Within  the  solid  walls  of  his 
own  Bastille  the  provost  of  the  merchants  was  first 
confined.  His  story  is  the  first  chapter  in  the  long 
chronicle  of  injustice  which  had  linked  itself  through 
the  centuries  with  the  name  of  the  Bastille.  The  last 
chapter  was  now  reached,  and  was  being  read  with 
amazing  rapidity  by  Saint-Antoine. 

The  story  of  Hugues  Aubriot's  career  has  all  the  ma- 
terials in  it  for  melodrama.  Aubriot  had  a  standing 
quarrel  with  the  University  of  Paris  and  with  Etienne 
Guidomare.  Guidomare  seems  to  have  been  a  typical 
student  of  the  time.  There  was  something  of  Panurge, 
something  of  Fran9ois  Villon,  something  of  Abelard, 
and  something  of  the  Admirable  Crichton  in  his  com- 


1370-1789.  HUGUES  AUBRIOT.  625 

position.     Provost  Aubriot  offended  the  university  on 
the  day  of  the  feast  of  Lendit,  in  1377,  in  September, 
by  interrupting  them  on  their  parchment-buying  pro- 
cession to  the  plain  of  St.  Denis  with  a  procession  of 
his  own,  in  which  a  luckless  lady  of  bad  character,  Ag- 
nes Piedeleu  by  name,  was  being  convoyed  througli  the 
streets  of  Paris,  stark  naked,  to  the  pillory.    The  woman, 
shivering  and  ashamed,  denounced  the  provost  at  every 
street  turn  as  the  abettor  of  the  crime  for  which  she 
was  suffering — she  was  accused  of  causing  the  ruin  of 
a  young  girl — and  she  called  on  the  students  to  rescue 
her.     There  was  very  near  being  a  free  fight,  which 
was  only  averted  by  the  discretion  of  the  rector  of  the 
university.     Hugues  Aubriot  had   student  Guidomare 
arrested  on  a  trumped-up  charge  of  seducing  a  young 
girl  named  Julienne  Brulefer,  and  the  student  only  es- 
caped through  King  Charles  V.'s  intercession  and  clem- 
ency.    The  feud  between  Aubriot  and  the  university, 
between  the  provost  and  the  student,  straggled  on  into 
the  next  reign,  Charles  VI.'s,  when  Aubriot  again  ar- 
rested  Guidomare   upon   the   old  charge.     Guidomare 
retaliated  by  accusing  Aubriot  of  keeping  a  Jewish 
mistress.     The  Jewess  gave  testimony  against  Aubriot, 
and  killed  herself  in  open  court.     Provost  Aubriot  was 
doomed  to  die  the  death,  but  the  royal  mercy  changed 
the  sentence  to  perpetual  imprisonment  in  the  Bastille, 
ef  which  he  had  laid  the  first  stone,  and  of  which  he 
was  the  first  prisoner.     Shortly  after  he  had  been  clap- 
ped into  jail  there  was  a  kind  of  twopenny-halfpenny 
insurrection  in  Paris  ;  the  mob  broke  open  the  Bastille 
— this  was  its  first  siege — and  sought  to  make  the  ex- 
provost  a  captain  over  them.     The  released  prisoner 
affected  great  gratitude,  promised  to  do  wonders  for 
them  on  the  morrow,  but  when  the  morrow  dawned 
I.— 40 


626  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XLIV. 

dismayed  insurrection  found  that  it  had  lost  its  leader. 
Aubriot,  sufficiently  thankful  to  breathe  the  free  air 
again  without  putting  his  head  in  peril  for  his  libera- 
tors, had  slipped  out  of  Paris  in  the  night.  He  made 
his  way  to  Dijon  in  Burgundy,  where  he  was  born,  and 
where,  a  little  while  later,  he  died  and  was  more  or  less 
forgotten.  Such  is  the  story,  historical  or  legendary; 
it  is  a  good  story,  and  inaugurates  with  sufficient  effect 
the  career  of  the  Bastille. 

Many  strange  inmates  that  Bastille  had  from  the 
days  of  Hugues  Aubriot  to  the  days  of  De  Launay. 
Illustrious  and  obscure,  base  and  noble,  famous  through- 
out the  world  or  destined  to  remain  forever  a  mystery, 
the  denizens  of  the  great  keep  pass  like  shadows  before 
us.  Lariviere  and  Noviant,  ministers  of  the  mad  king 
Charles  VI.,  knew  the  Bastille,  and  narrowly  escaped 
death  for  their  supposed  share  in  the  burning  of  the 
"Savages."  The  two  hermits  of  the  order  of  St.  Au- 
gustin,  who  came  to  Paris  to  cure  the  mad  king,  were 
lodged  in  the  Bastille  for  a  while  as  guests  until  they 
failed,  when  they  were  beheaded.  Montagu,  convicted 
of  plotting  against  Charles,  went  to  his  death  from  the 
Bastille.  Pierre  des  Essarts,  his  enemy,  who  died  on 
the  scaffold  in  his  turn,  held  the  Bastille  when  it  was 
besieged  by  the  Burgundians,  led  by  the  butcher  Ca- 
boche.  Then  came  the  influence  of  the  English  in 
1415.  The  Armagnacs  in  the  Bastille  were  massacred 
in  1418.  When  Henry  V.  was  made  regent  of  France 
he  made  his  brother  Clarence  captain  of  Paris,  and  put 
English  garrisons  in  the  Bastille,  Louvre,  and  Vincennes. 
Stout  English  soldiers  lounged  at  ease  in  that  Bastille 
which  Englishmen  afterwards  were  to  help  to  take. 
When  the  French  factions  united  against  England,  and 
traitor  Michel  Laillier  opened  the  gates  to  Richemont, 


1370-1789.  COME   LIKE   SHADOWS.  627 

the  English  garrison  were  allowed  to  march  out  and 
embark  behind  the  Louvre.  The  Duke  of  Exeter,  who 
succeeded  Clarence,  killed  at  Baugy,  as  governor  of 
Paris,  made  Sir  John  Falstaff  governor  of  the  Bastille. 
Falstaff  was  succeeded  by  Lord  Willoughby  d'Eresby, 
under  whom  it  was  evacuated.  Under  Louis  XL,  the 
Bastille  did  not  want  for  tenants.  It  knew  D'Harau- 
court,  Bishop  of  Verdun  ;  probably  Cardinal  Balue ; 
certainly  Antoine  de  Chabannes,  Count  of  Dammartin, 
who  actually  escaped.  It  knew  Louis  de  Luxembourg, 
Count  of  St.  Pol,  and  Armagnac,  Duke  of  Nemours, 
who  were  both  executed.  Under  Francis  I.  it  held 
Admiral  Chabot  and  his  enemy  Chancellor- Poyet.  Un- 
der Henry  II.,  Anne  du  Bourg  and  Dufaure  were  im- 
prisoned for  Protestantism,  and  Du  Bourg  was  exe- 
cuted. Montgomery  and  Montmorency  were  Bastilled 
by  Catherine  de'  Medici.  Under  Henry  III.  the  Bas- 
tille greeted  the  monk  Poncet,  the  Archdeacon  Rossiers, 
and  our  old  friend  Bussy  d'Amboise.  Laurent  Tetti 
held  the  Bastille  during  the  "  Battle  of  the  Barricades," 
and  surrendered  it  to  De  Guise,  who  handed  it  over  to 
Bussy  Leclerc.  Madame  de  Thou  was  the  first  woman 
imprisoned  in  the  Bastille.  It  does  not  seem  quite  cer- 
tain whether  Brisson  the  president,  whom  Bussy  Leclerc 
hanged,  and  who  asked,  like  Lavoisier,  to  be  allowed  to 
live  till  he  had  finished  the  work  he  was  engaged  upon, 
was  in  the  Bastille.  Mayenne  compelled  Leclerc  to 
surrender  the  Bastille;  he  retired  to  Brussels,  and  there 
tranquilly  died.  Du  Bourg  1'Espinasse,  the  successor 
to  Leclerc,  refused  at  first  to  surrender  the  Bastille  to 
Henry  IV.  "  If  the  king  be  master  of  Paris,  I  am  mas- 
ter of  the  Bastille,"  he  asserted  sturdily.  He  was  al- 
lowed to  march  out  with  the  honors  of  war,  and  Henry 
entered  accompanied  by  Biron  —  poor  Biron,  actually 


628  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

the  hero  of  "  Love's  Labor's  Lost,"  whom  grim  fate  car- 
ried there  again  to  his  death.  The  Count  of  Auvergne's 
long  imprisonment  is  one  of  the  features  of  Bastille 
history. 

Jean  de  Saulx,  Viscount  of  Tavannes,  was  imprisoned 
in  the  Bastille,  was  exchanged  against  four  ladies,  im- 
prisoned again,  and  finally  escaped.  Sully  threw  him- 
self into  the  Bastille  at  the  death  of  Henry  IV.  Conde 
was  imprisoned  in  the  Bastille.  La  Galigai,  wife  of 
the  murdered  Concini,  knew  the  Bastille.  Under  Rich- 
elieu the  place  had  ever  so  many  prisoners,  including 
old  Bassompierre,  and  ex-governors  Vitry  and  Luxem- 
bourg. The-  Bastille  was  besieged  in  1649  under  the 
Fronde  by  D'Elbosuf,  and  surrendered  by  Du  Tremblay. 
De  Retz  smiled  at  some  talk  there  was  of  pulling  down 
the  fortress.  Mademoiselle  was  at  the  Bastille  in  1652, 
firing  on  the  enemy.  Danish  Rantzau  lay  his  term  in 
the  Bastille,  and  died  of  dropsy  soon  after  his  release. 
Under  Louis  XIV.  the  false  Christ,  Morin,  was  Bastilled 
and  burned.  Then  came  the  wild  time  of  the  poisoners 
and  sorcerers.  Madame  de  Montespan  was  accused  of 
attending  a  mass  when  naked.  People  talked  much 
then  of  indecent  masses,  of  naked  women  used  for  al- 
tars, black  candles  burned,  and  mass  said  and  gospel 
read  backwards,  and  other  nonsense,  which,  however, 
helped  to  keep  the  Bastille  going.  M.  de  Bragelonne 
was  sent  to  the  Bastille  in  1663  for  gambling  in  an  un- 
privileged house.  Fouquet  lay  in  the  Bastille  guarded 
by  famous  D'Artagnan  and  his  musketeers.  Bussy 
Rabutin,  in  1665,  was  imprisoned  for  the  second  time 
for  writing  the  "  Histoire  Amoureuse."  Lauzun  was 
clapped  in  the  Bastille  for  jealousy  of  Mme.  de  Monaco. 
The  Bastille  knew  Marsilly,  the  English  agent,  Maupeou, 
De  Rohan.  It  knew  the  Man  in  the  Iron  Mask,  whom 


1870-1789.  SO  DEPART.  629 

Colonel  Jung  considers  to  have  been  one  Marcheuille, 
the  chief  of  a  plot  against  Louis  XIV.,  arrested  on  the 
banks  of  Somme  in  1673.  A  quarrel  between  Count 
d'Arrnagnac  and  the  Duke  de  Gramont  over  a  horse- 
race ended  in  a  blow  and  one  night's  imprisonment.  In 
1686  a  young  Englishwoman  was  imprisoned  for  aiding 
the  escape  of  Protestant  children.  She  escaped  herself, 
we  learn,  somehow.  It  would  almost  seem  as  if  our 
English  dramatist  Vanbrugh  was  in  the  Bastille  for  a 
season.  An  Englishman  named  Nelson  knew  of  its 
hospitality.  So  like  shadows  come  and  go  the  heroes 
of  the  Bastille  history :  the  fanciful  may  imagine  that 
their  gray  ghosts  flitted  on  the  air  on  that  July  14,  and 
surveyed  with  ironical  satisfaction — if,  indeed,  as  Lamb 
doubts,  ghosts  can  be  ironical — the  destruction  of  their 
old-time  prison-house. 

Carlyle,  writing  at  a  time  when  the  taking  of  the 
Bastille  was  as  recent  as  the  "Year  of  Revolution," 
1848,  is  to  us,  complains  despairingly  of  the  difficulty 
of  his  task.  "  Could  one  but,  after  infinite  reading,  get 
to  understand  so  much  as  the  plan  of  the  building." 
No  such  difficulty  lies  in  the  student's  way  to-day. 
There  is  a  little  library  of  books  in  existence  upon  the 
Bastille;  the  ambitious  scholar  can  study  it  in  plan  and 
section,  and,  in  the  Arab  phrase,  know  it  as  well  as  he 
knows  his  own  horse.  In  the  year  of  centenary,  and 
for  a  twelvemonth  before,  Paris  was  amused  and  enter- 
tained by  the  erection  of  a  sham  Bastille,  which  re- 
called, though  in  a  changed  locality,  the  terrors  and  the 
triumphs  of  1789.  Perhaps  to  the  imaginative  mind 
that  mimic  reconstruction  of  old  Paris  may  bring  a 
little  closer  the  conception  of  the  old  Rue  Saint-An- 
toine  and  the  old  Bastille,  with  the  little  houses  and 
the  little  shops  nestling  at  its  base.  It  is  a  picture  in 


630  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

little  indeed :  the  lath  and  plaster  and  cardboard  have 
not  the  proportions  of  the  antique  stones,  so  many  of 
which  now  withstand  the  wash  of  the  Seine  on  the 
Concord  Bridge.  But  we  must  remember,  too,  that  the 
Bastille  was  not  really  so  portentous  as  it  looks  in  the 
pictures  and  engravings  of  the  time.  In  those  pictures, 
in  those  engravings,  the  proportions  of  the  Bastille  are 
amazingly  exaggerated — no  doubt,  as  has  been  suggest- 
ed, for  the  sake  of  enhancing  the  merit  of  the  victors. 
The  Bastille  was  in  reality  not  quite  so  high  as  the 
Louvre,  and  was  not  half  so  long  as  the  Louvre  colon- 
nade. Its  walls  were  ninety-six  French  feet  high  on 
the  exterior,  and  seventy-three  feet  internally,  and  nine 
feet  thick.  Its  ditches  were  twenty-three  feet  lower 
than  the  level  of  the  interior  courts. 

It  is  sufficiently  easy  for  the  revolutionary  student  to 
reconstruct  the  scene  of  the  greatest  and  shortest  siege 
in  history.  The  grounds  of  the  Bastille  lay  in  the  an- 
gle formed  by  the  Place  Saint-Antoine  and  the  Rue  de 
la  Contrescarpe,  and  extended  all  along  the  Rue  Saint- 
Antoine  to  the  point  where  the  Rue  des  Tournelles 
abutted  on  it.  This  was  the  point  at  which  the  attack 
took  place.  The  spectator  standing  at  the  opening  of 
the  Rue  des  Tournelles  saw  the  two  end  and  three  side 
towers  rising  high  and  sullen  in  front  of  him.  Below 
to  the  right,  and  at  right  angle  to  the  fortress,  was  the 
entrance  to  the  Bastille.  Immediately  adjoining  this 
gate,  and  nestling  to  the  outer  wall  of  the  Bastille,  was 
a  small  cluster  of  shops,  and  shops  continued  with  inter- 
vals all  along  this  low  outer  wall  well  down  the  Rue 
Saint-Antoine  to  the  Saint-Antoine  gate. 

Every  one  of  the  eight  grim  towers  bore  its  own 
name  and  its  own  terror.  On  the  side  which  looked 
towards  the  city  were  ranged  the  Tower  of  the  Well, 


1789.  THE  BASTILLE  AND  SAINT- ANTOINE.  631 

the  Tower  of  Liberty— surely  the  most  ironical  baptism 
—the  Tower  of  La  Berthaudiere,  and  the  Tower  of  La 
Basiniere.  On  the  side  which  flanked  the  Faubourg 
of  Saint-Antoine  were  the  towers  of  the  Corner,  of  the 
Chapel,  of  the  Treasure,  and  of  the  Compte.  Sully  in 
the  spacious  days  of  the  fourth  Henry  had  joined  the 
grand  arsenal  to  the  Bastille,  which  was  thus  a  perfect 
storehouse  of  arms,  a  fact  familiar  to  the  popular  mind, 
and  much  ruminated  upon  at  a  moment  when  arms  be- 
came essential. 

Who  first  thought  of  the  Bastille ;  across  whose  ad- 
venturous mind  on  that  July  morning  did  the  idea  flash 
of  directing  the  strength  of  insurgent  Paris  against  the 
ancient  prison  ?  We  shall  probably  never  know.  The 
people  wanted  arms.  Wild,  incoherent  schemes  of  bat- 
tle with  the  royal  troops  in  the  Champ  de  Mars,  of 
triumphant  march  upon  Versailles,  seethed  in  unreason- 
ing brains.  Cooler  and  more  logical  minds  thought  of 
defending  Paris  against  possible,  against  almost  inevit- 
able assault,  and  of  arming  awakened  patriotism  as 
speedily  as  possible.  Under  these  conditions  it  was 
natural  that  the  minds  of  men  should  turn  to  the  two 
great  storehouses,  or  to  what  they  believed  to  be  the 
two  great  storehouses,  of  arms  in  the  city,  the  Hotel  des 
Invalides  and  the  Bastille  fortress.  No  man's  mind  on 
the  morning  of  July  14  cherished  the  thought  of  captur- 
ing the  Bastille  as  a  great  act  of  patriotic  protest. 
When  Saint-Antoine  turned  to  march  upon  the  prison, 
it  had  no  notion  that  it  was  inaugurating  a  new  epoch 
in  history.  Saint-Antoine  wanted  weapons,  so  did  its 
brother,  Saint-Marceau.  Saint-Marceau  knew  that  arms 
were  stored  in  the  Invalides.  Saint-Antoine  believed 
that  arms  were  stored  behind  the  gray  familiar  walls  of 
the  Bastille.  Saint-Marceau  naturally  and  simply  went 


632  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

to  the  Invalides.     Saint- Antoine  no  less  naturally  and 
simply  went  to  the  Bastille. 

But  the  determination  of  Saint- Antoine  and  others  to 
march  upon  the  Bastille  was  causing  the  wildest  excite- 
ment in  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  where  the  committee  of 
electors  were  desperately,  well-nigh  despairingly,  delib- 
erating. What,  they  asked  themselves  piteously,  could 
an  ill-armed,  ill-disciplined  rabble  do  against  the  im- 
pregnable Bastille  ?  What  could  come  of  any  such 
business  but  swift,  inevitable  retribution  from  the  armies 
that  were  gathering  like  eagles  around  Paris  ?  Still, 
Bastillism  was  in  the  air.  Every  one's  thoughts  turned 
to  the  Bastille,  inside  the  Electoral  Committee  as  out- 
side of  it.  The  wildest  schemes  for  its  capture  were 
solemnly  submitted  to  the  storm-tossed  assemblage. 
One  worthy  locksmith  had  the  brilliant  idea  that  it  was 
to  be  taken  by  the  good  old  Roman  plan  of  the  cata- 
pault,  which  by  dashing  enormous  blocks  of  stone  at  the 
Bastille  should  batter  a  breach  in  its  wall  through  which 
patriotism  might  rush.  The  classically  minded  lock- 
smith was  elbowed  aside  by  M.  de  la  Caussidiere,  major- 
general  of  Parisian  militia,  who  insisted  that  the  Bas- 
tille, like  all  other  fortresses,  was  only  to  be  taken  ac- 
cording to  the  regular  and  formal  rules  of  military  war- 
fare. Ideas  as  wild,  if  not  wilder,  were  agitating  else- 
where heads  as  frenzied.  Certain  of  the  men  of  Saint- 
Antoine  had  set  a  captain  over  them  in  the  person  of 
that  brewer  Santerre  who  had  first  of  Frenchmen  em- 
ployed coke  in  the  roasting  of  malt,  the  brewer  Santerre 
whom  Johnson  had  met  and  talked  with  when  he  trav- 
elled with  the  Thrales  in  Paris  in  1775.  He  was  now 
engaged  in  turning  the  scientific  side  of  his  mind  upon 
the  question  of  the  moment.  Scientific  Santerre  thought 
that  an  ingenious  blend  of  oil  of  turpentine  and  phos- 


SANMRRfi.  693 

phorus  might  be  forced  through  the  pumps  of  fire-en- 
gines and  so  set  fire  to  the  accursed  place.     Scientific 
Santerre  had  the  pumps  actually  carried  to  the  space 
before  the  Bastille.     As  the  oil  and  phosphorus  notion 
was  soon  abandoned,  the  pumps  were  used  later  in  an 
endeavour  to  send  a  stream  of  water  upon  the  touch- 
stones of  the  Bastille  cannon.     This  ingenious  purpose 
was  baulked  by  the  fact  that  the  pumps  refused  to 
carry  their  stream  of  water  anything  like  high  enough. 
What  was  an  indignant  populace,  what  was  a  storm- 
tossed  Electoral  Committee  to  do  in  the  face  of  that 
grim,  gray,  unconquerable  fortress  ?     Neither  populace 
nor  committee  knew  that  by  some  curious  blundering 
De  Launay,  governor  of  the  Bastille,  had  little  means 
of  holding  out  long.    There  was  powder  enough,  and  to 
spare  indeed,  but  a  grave  lack  of  provisions.     He  had 
only  two  sacks  of  flour,  it  seems,  and  a  little  rice  where- 
with to  feed  his  garrison.    The  garrison  was  small  enough 
too — thirty-two  Swiss  with  their  commander,  Louis  la 
Flue,  eighty-two  Invalides,  Major  de  Losme-Salbray,  and 
the  governor  himself.     A  grim  position,  though  there 
were  fifteen  good  cannon  on  the  platforms  of  the  towi'rs, 
and  though  it  needed  no  great  number  of  men  to  handle 
fifteen  cannon.     But  the  crowd  outside  the  Bastille,  and 
the  crowd  outside  and  inside  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  knew 
little  or  nothing  of  the  bad  garrisoning  and  worse  vic- 
tualling of  the  Bastille.     They  only  saw  before  them 
their  old  familiar  enemy  holding  its  head  high,  and  they 
wasted  their  wild  energies  in  desperate  devices  such  as 
those  of  the  classical  locksmith  and  the  scientific  San- 
terre.     The  Electoral  Committee  in  its  perplexity  sent 
at  eight  o'clock  a  deputation — Bellon,  Billefod,  and  Cha- 
tOM — military  men  all  of  them.     These  actually  break- 
fasted with  De  Launay,  spent  some  three  hours  with 


634  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

him,  and  came  back  to  say  that  De  Launay  had  drawn 
back  bis  cannon,  and  would  only  use  them  in  self-defence. 
This  was  not  what  the  crowd  outside  the  Bastille  want- 
ed. Not  for  three  hours'  parley  did  they  come  together 
did  they  now  wait  clamoring  under  the  gray  walls.  All 
Paris  seemed  to  be  marching  on  the  place.  For,  once 
set  in  motion,  the  popular  movement  became  irresist- 
ible. As  the  wild  mob  tramped  its  way  through  the 
faubourg,  it  grew  and  grew  in  volume.  Every  street, 
every  alley,  every  shop,  hovel,  garret,  and  cellar  yielded 
some  recruit  for  the  wild  ranks,  some  man  who  could 
brandish  a  knife  or  shoulder  a  musketoon,  or  wield  some 
improvised  pike  of  his  own  making.  Out  of  the  slums 
and  the  blind-alleys  ran  rivulets  of  squalid,  ferocious  hu- 
manity to  swell  the  roaring  tide  that  was  sweeping,  wave 
upon  wave,  against  the  Bastille.  Those  who  had  first 
arrived  before  the  fortress  found  themselves  compelled 
to  abide  at  their  post.  Every  avenue  of  approach  to 
the  Bastille  was  choked  with  men.  Every  moment  the 
pressure  from  afar  grew  greater.  What  had  been  the 
extreme  outer  rank  and  fringe  of  the  crowd  a  second 
since,  was  now  in  its  turn  cinctured  by  fresh  contin- 
gents, all  swaying,  shouting,  pushing  towards  the  Bas- 
tille. Whatever  those  who  were  nearest  to  the  Bastille 
may  have  felt  as  they  gazed  upon  its  apparently  im- 
pregnable towel's,  they  had  to  go  on  with  their  task. 
Retreat  was  impossible  Before  them  lay  the  prison, 
behind  them  the  most  fantastic  multitude  that  ever 
came  together  for  the  assault  of  mortal  fortress  before. 
Poor  wretches  more  ragged  than  the  beggars  of  Callot's 
fancy,  smug  citizens  in  sober  browns  and  hodden  grays, 
National  Guards  in  vivid  uniforms,  lean  men  of  the  law 
in  funereal  black,  strangers  from  all  the  ends  of  the 
earth  in  odd  foreign  habiliments,  gentlemen  in  coats 


1?89.  DE   LA   ROSIERE. 


635 


that  would  not  have  shamed  a  court  ceremonial,  all  were 
blended  together  in  one  inconceivable  raving  medley. 

At  ten  of  the  clock  that  inconceivable,  raving  medley 
found  an  ambassador  in  the  person  of  Thuriot  de  la 
Rosiere,  deputed  by  the  district  of  Saint-Louis  de  la 
Culture,  and  accompanied  by  Dourlier  and  Toulouse 
and  a  number  of  the  crowd.  Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere  de- 
manded speech  of  the  governor,  and  so  became  for  the 
moment  famous,  unwitting  of  a  9th  of  Thermidor  yet 
to  come  when  he  shall  help  to  refuse  speech  to  a  Robes- 
pierre, and  so  become  for  the  moment  again  famous. 
Speech  was  at  first  denied,  afterwards  granted,  and 
Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere,  unaccompanied,  was  permitted 
to  enter  and  to  interview  the  governor.  Thuriot  de  la 
Rosiere  seems  to  have  conducted  his  interview  with  De 
Launay  in  imperious  fashion.  He  harangued  the  sol- 
diers. The  Swiss  did  not  understand  a  syllable,  but  the 
Invalides,  it  is  said,  understood  and  trembled  at  their 
stern  significance.  "  I  come,"  he  said  to  De  Launay, 
"  in  the  name  of  the  nation  to  tell  you  that  your  levelled 
cannon  disturb  the  people,  and  to  call  upon  you  to  re- 
move them."  De  Launay  declared  that  he  could  only 
remove  them  in  obedience  to  a  direct  order  from  the 
king  himself.  Still  he  had,  he  declared,  withdrawn  them 
from  the  apertures  so  that  they  were  invisible  from  out- 
side. De  Launay  seems  to  have  definitely  promised  not 
to  make  any  use  of  his  cannon  unless  attacked  in  the 
^first  instance.  While  the  interview  was  going  on,  it  is 
said  that  the  people  outside  began  to  grow  alarmed  at 
Thuriot's  long  absence,  and  to  cry  out  for  him,  and  that 
to  pacify  their  demands  De  Launay  led  Thuriot  to  the 
platform  of  the  tower  that  the  people  might  see  him. 
Perhaps  Thuriot  only  came  on  the  platform  of  the  tower 
to  see  that  the  cannon  were  indeed  withdrawn  from  the 


636  THE  FftfiNCH  DEVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

embrasures  according  to  promise.  Anyhow,  he  appeared 
on  one  of  the  towers,  and  was  greeted  with  a  wild  cry 
of  joy  from  the  crowd  below. 

If  one  could  only  conjure  up  some  picture  of  the  sight 
of  that  crowd,  of  the  sea  of  faces  which  stared  up  at 
those  Bastille  turrets,  and  watched  for  the  figure  of 
Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere,  black  against  the  sky.  To  Thu- 
riot,  looking  down,  a  sea  of  indistinguishable  faces, 
stretching  far  as  the  eye  could  reach  down  every  ave- 
nue, lost  itself  at  last  in  mere  blackness  of  packed  heads 
in  the  distant  streets.  The  faces  were  mostly  French 
faces,  ferocious  faces,  the  faces  that  the  Old  Order  had 
so  zealously  driven  down  out  of  sight,  the  faces  of  a  rab- 
ble whom  famine  and  despair  held  shut  for  so  long  in 
the  shadow  of  death,  and  who  had  now  crept  out  into 
the  July  sunlight  to  look  about  them  a  little  with  blink- 
ing, bloodshot  eyes.  If  there  was  much  that  was  wolf- 
ish, much  that  was  obscene,  much  that  was  so  ominous 
in  those  haggard  faces,  it  was  the  fault  of  the  Old  Or- 
der which  made  them  what  they  were.  It  made  them 
into  beasts  of  prey,  and  now  the  beasts  of  prey  were 
free,  and  would  fain  rend  their  masters.  But  the  faces 
were  not  all  such  nightmare  visions.  There  were  faces 
there  of  men  made  to  lead,  of  men  who  were  to  be  fa- 
mous or  infamous  by-and-by.  The  French  Guards,  with 
the  qualities  of  training  impressed  upon  their  grave,  sol- 
dierly faces,  lent  a  solid  dignity  to  the  mad  scene.  Other 
faces,  too,  besides  French  faces,  were  discernible  in  the 
throng.  One  spectator  sees  the  Tartar  face  of  a  Turk 
among  the  assailants.  What  brought  the  child  of  Islam 
there  ?  There  was  probably  at  least  one  British  face 
there,  the  eager  Scotch  face  of  William  Playfair  of  Ed- 
inburgh; indeed,  if  he  were  not  there  it  is  hard  to  see 
how  he  avoided  it.  While  his  brother,  John  Playfair, 


1789.          WILLIAM   PLAYFAIR   AND  JOHN   STONE.  637 

was  quietly  making  himself  a  quiet  name  as  a  mathe- 
matician and  geologist  in  Edinburgh,  wandering  Will- 
iam had  drifted  into  France,  and  drifted  into  the  Rev- 
olution. He  was  a  member  of  the  Saint- Antoine  mili- 
tia, which  had  been  enrolled  on  the  night  before  this 
Bastille  morning,  and  it  is  scarcely  likely  that  he  would 
be  found  missing  from  the  ranks  of  his  new  fellowship. 
As  we  here  probably  see  the  first  of  him,  we  may  as 
well  see  the  last  of  him.  It  was  his  destiny  to  rescue 

r  J 

D'Epremesnil  from  popular  fury  in  the  Palais  Royal,  in 
the  February  of  1791 — a  kindly,  courageous  deed  which 
has  been  inaccurately  ascribed  to  Petion — to  be  threat- 
ened by  the  fulminations  of  Barere,  to  escape  by  way 
of  Holland  to  London,  and  ruminate  a  scheme  for  de- 
stroying the  Revolution  which  he  had  served  by  means 
of  a  system  of  forged  assignats;  to  return  to  Paris  after 
Waterloo  and  edit  GalignanVs  Messenger,  which  still 
goes  on  wrhile  poor  Play  fair  is  forgotten;  and  to  die  in 
London  at  the  age  of  sixty-four. 

There  is  another  face  of  English  mould  visible  to  the 
mind's  eye  among  the  besiegers  of  the  Bastille — the  face 
of  John  Stone  of  Tiverton.  We  may  meet  and  part  with 
him,  too,  at  once.  It  was  his  destiny  to  bring  together 
the  "gallant  and  seditious  Geraldine,"  young  Lord  Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald,  and  the  beautiful  Pamela,  daughter  of 
Madame  de  Genlis  and  of  Equality  Orleans.  It  was  his 
destiny  to  share  the  suspicion  with  which  the  Revolu- 
tion regarded  all  Englishmen  after  the  affair  of  Toulon, 
and  to  taste  the  fare  of  French  prisons.  It  was  his  des- 
tiny to  adore  the  Girondists,  and  to  glorify  Charlotte 
Corday.  It  was  his  destiny  to  die  peacefully  in  Paris 
after  his  stormy  life,  and  to  sleep  in  Pere  la  Chaise,  by 
the  side,  no  doubt,  of  Helen  Maria  Williams,  whom  he 
loved,  not  wisely,  but  too  well, 


638  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  Cn.  XLIV. 

Such  are  some  of  the  faces  we  may  note  while  the 
crowd  grows  and  gathers  in  the  space  about  the  Bastille. 
Thuriot  de  laRosiere,  having  seen  and  been  seen  by  the 
multitude  from  the  summit  of  the  prison,  came  down 
again  to  address  a  vain  appeal  to  the  soldiers  under  De 
Launay's  command,  and  to  assure  the  mob  without  that 
De  Launay  would  not  surrender.  At  this  news  the 
clamor  and  the  confusion  grew  louder  and  more  bewil- 
dering. The  angry  sea  still  tossed,  but  as  yet  the  signs 
were  not  entirely  menacing.  A  number  of  persons  came 
forward  asking  for  arms  ;  asking  for  peace.  As  they 
appeared  to  be  well-intentioned,  M.  de  Launay  was  not 
unwilling  to  receive  them,  and  allowed  the  first  draw- 
bridge to  be  lowered.  On  this  drawbridge  the  new  dep- 
utation rushed,  but  was  followed  in  its  rush  by  a  num- 
ber of  the  crowd  without.  The  governor  appears  to 
have  feared  an  attack  upon  his  little  garrison;  the  order 
to  fire  was  given,  was  obeyed,  the  crowd  was  driven 
back  with  bloodshed,  and  the  drawbridge  hurriedly 
pulled  up  again  amid  the  wild  cries  of  those  outside, 
who  considered  themselves  the  victims  of  treachery. 
Fire  and  bloodshed  had  begun;  fire  and  bloodshed  was 
to  be  from  that  moment  the  order  of  the  day. 

If  it  were  only  not  so  astonishingly  hard  to  unravel 
the  story  of  this  famous  siege  !  The  very  multiplicity 
of  existing  accounts  only  renders  the  task  more  difficult. 
The  different  descriptions  of  the  day's  deeds  vary  in  the 
most  essential  particulars;  conflict  and  clash  upon  points 
which  are  absolutely  essential  to  the  proper  comprehen- 
sion of  the  story.  Never  perhaps  has  the  difficulty  of 
sifting  historical  testimony  and  winnowing  satisfactory 
grain  from  the  monstrosity  of  chaff  been  more  fantas- 
tically illustrated.  On  the  most  vital  points,  one  ap- 
parently perfectly  credible  witness  will  say  one  thing, 


1789.  CONFLICTING  STATEMENTS.  639 

and  another  witness,  apparently  no  less  credible,  appa- 
rently testifying  in  no  les^  good  faith,  will  roundly  as- 
sert diametrically  the  opposite.  We  have  on  record 
the  statements  of  men  who  were  outside  the  prison;  we 
have  also  the  statement  of  one  man  who  was  inside  the 
prison  during  the  whole  siege;  and  it  is  beyond  expres- 
sion perplexing  to  find  that  the  accounts  refuse  to  tally. 
That  two  accounts  of  such  a  wild,  tumultuous  affair 
should  differ  in  some  degree  is  inevitable;  that  they 
should  differ  as  widely  as  they  do  is  almost  inexplica- 
ble. But  they  do  differ,  and  all  that  the  amazed  student 
can  do  is  to  weigh  as  best  he  can  and  decide  as  best  he 
can,  and  so  make  the  best  or  worst  of  it.  The  actual 
truth  is  apparently  unknowable;  each  of  us  must  read 
by  the  gloss  of  the  law  of  probability  as  best  he  can. 

Thus,  for  example,  it  would  appear  from  some  ac- 
counts that  after  Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere's  interview 
with  De  Launay  there  was  another  deputation,  another 
interview  between  the  governor  and  a  deputy  of  the 
people,  M.  de  Corny.  Between  the  Corny  interview 
and  the  Thuriot  interview  much  confusion  seems  to 
have  arisen,  and  some  writers  attribute  to  Corny  what 
others  attribute  to  Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere.  Again,  as  re- 
gards the  firing  upon  the  deputation  for  whom  De  Lau- 
nay had  lowered  the  first  drawbridge,  it  is  stated  in  the 
memoir  of  one  of  the  besieged  soldiers  that  the  firing 
only  began  in  self-defence  when  the  armed  mob  came 
rushing  towards  them  shouting  demands  for  the  Bastille 
and  imprecations  upon  the  troops,  and  began  cutting 
the  chains  of  the  drawbridge.  Some  say  that  De  Lau- 
nay's  men  only  fired  powder  in  order  to  alarm  the  some- 
what disorderly  invaders  of  the  drawbridge.  However, 
from  whatever  cause,  firing  had  taken  place,  and  the 
regular  siege  of  the  Bastille  had  now  begun.  Two  sol- 


640  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

diers,  Louis  Tournay,  of  the  Dauphin  Regiment,  and 
Aubin  Bonnemere,  of  the  Royal  Comptois  regiment, 
mounted  on  the  bridge  which  closed  the  Court  of  the 
Government,  aided,  perhaps,  by  bayonets  stuck  between 
the  stones,  and,  climbing  on  the  roof  of  the  guard- 
house, they  succeeded  in  getting  inside  the  first  enclo- 
sure. De  Launay  had  left  only  one  Invalide  to  guard 
the  drawbridge  here.  He  had  given  orders  to  the  sol- 
diers at  the  second  gates  not  to  fire  upon  the  assailants 
before  first  calling  upon  them  to  retire,  which  could  not 
now  be  done  in  consequence  of  the  distance  between 
besiegers  and  besieged.  Comparatively  at  their  ease, 
Louis  Tournay  and  Aubin  Bonnemere  hacked  away  at 
the  chains  of  the  drawbridge,  apparently  under  no 
"  fiery  hail."  The  bridge  at  last  fell,  crushing  some  of 
the  assailants  underneath  it.  The  crowd  foamed  over, 
and  the  first  court  was  won. 

But  the  winning  of  that  first  court  was  not  every- 
thing—  was  not  even  much;  seemed,  indeed,  almost 
nothing  to  the  invaders.  It  is  difficult  to  form  a  clear 
idea  of  the  swift  succession  of  events  during  the  early 
hours  of  that  July  noon.  From  the  Cour  de  Gouverne- 
ment,  from  adjoining  roofs,  from  behind  the  shelter  of 
convenient  walls,  the  besiegers  blazed  away  desperately 
and  wholly  unavailingly  at  the  walls,  the  towers,  the 
turrets.  From  the  platforms  the  besieged  answered 
back,  firing  at  random  into  the  crowd  below,  and  with 
more  effect.  Accounts  clash  here,  as  at  all  points  of 
this  momentous  siege.  If  we  were  to  accept  the  au- 
thority of  certain  highly  wrought  engravings  of  the 
time,  we  should  conjure  up  a  picture  of  a  mighty  keep, 
its  ramparts  bristling  with  legions  of  defenders  and 
assailed  by  a  desperate  populace,  who  are  boldly  attack- 
ing it  in  front,  and  who  in  some  representations  are 


SIEGE  OF  THE  BASTILLE.  64! 

actually  endeavoring  to  take  it  by  assault  by  means  of 
scaling-ladders  and  the  like.  Anti-revolutionary  histo- 
rians, on  the  other  hand,  have  made  light  of  the  whole 
business  ;  have  sneered  at  the  famous  siege  as  a  theat- 
rical sham  from  beginning  to  end  ;  have  declared  that 
the  Bastille  never  would  have  been  taken  —  never,  in 
fact,  was  taken,  but  was  only  surrendered  by  a  humane 
governor,  who  was  barbarously  betrayed.  What  is  cer- 
tain is  that  the  Bastille  was  surrounded,  through  all  the 
early  morn  and  afternoon  of  that  summer  day,  by  an 
hourly  swelling  crowd ;  that  all  the  streets  in  the  im- 
mediate neighborhood  were  black  with  an  excited 
throng,  starred  here  and  there  by  spots  of  color,  where 
soldiers  in  brilliant  royal  uniforms  and  men  of  the 
Gardes  Fran9aises  mingled  with  the  assailants.  After 
firing  began — however  firing  did  begin — it  kept  on  for 
hours,  shots  spitting  from  the  black  earth,  from  the 
yawning  windows,  from  the  tiled  roofs  upon  the  keep, 
and  having  about  as  much  effect  upon  its  rugged  walls 
as  so  many  cheap  fireworks.  From  the  Bastille  itself 
occasionally,  but  not  too  regularly,  rolled  down  an  an- 
swering peal.  Once  and  once  only  was  a  Bastille  can- 
non fired.  It  has  been  asked,  in  wonder,  why  De  Lau- 
nay  did  not  use  his  cannon  save  this  one  time — why 
he  did  not  play  with  his  artillery  upon  the  concourse 
beneath,  and  sweep,  as  he  easily  could  have  swept,  the 
streets  for  the  time  being  clean  of  enemies.  Is  is  hard 
to  find  an  answer.  De  Launay  was,  perhaps,  unnerved, 
lie  seems  to  have  been  a  man  capable  of  conceiving 
strenuous  deeds,  but  little  capable  of  carrying  them 
into  execution.  Perhaps  he  put  confidence  in  those  as- 
suring orders  of  Besenval's,  and  looked  for  hourly  re- 
lief. Perhaps  he  began  to  fear  that  the  Bastille  must 
fall,  and  deemed  it  as  well  not  to  put  himself  beyond 
I.— 41 


642  THE   FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

the  pale  of  pity  with  that  wild  mob,  who  might  be  soon 
his  masters.  Perhaps  he  felt  that  he  could  not  count  on 
the  obedience .  of  his  soldiery.  Whatever  the  reason 
may  have  been,  it  is  certain  that  the  Bastille  cannon 
were,  with  one  exception,  not  used  on  that  wild  day  ; 
their  last  chance  of  shooting  forth  flame  and  iron  upon 
a  rebellious  Paris  was  happily  denied  to  them. 

In  all  that  seething  mass  of  besiegers  certain  men 
make  themselves  especially  conspicuous,  certain  names 
have  passed  into  history  enveloped  with  a  kind  of  le- 
gendary fame,  much  akin  to  that  which  belongs  to  the 
heroes  of  heroic  epics,  to  the  Four  Sons  of  Aymon,  and 
the  Peers  of  Charlemagne.  Especially  conspicuous,  es- 
pecially dear  to  Saint  -  Antoine,  was  Santerre  —  then 
thinking  nothing  of  the  advantages  of  coke  in  the 
roasting  of  malt,  thinking  only  of  blended  oil  and  phos- 
phorus, or  of  any  other  blend  that  would  serve  to 
roast  the  Bastille.  Santerre  got  wounded  in  that  siege, 
but  not  to  the  death  ;  he  was  fated  to  outlive  the  Revo- 
lution, and  mourn  the  ruin  of  an  excellent  brewing 
business. 

Another  conspicuous  figure  was  young  Elie,  officer  in 
a  regiment  of  the  queen,  who  came  to  the  siege  in  citi- 
zen's attire,  and  went  away  to  invest  himself  in  his  mil- 
itary garb  to  command  the  more  respect,  and  was  back 
again  and  in  the  thick  of  it  as  soon  as  might  be.  Near 
to  him  wras  another  young  man,  some  thirty  years  of 
age,  Pierre  Auguste  Hulin,  who  had  been  many  things 
in  his  span — waiter,  working  clock-maker,  chasseur  to 
the  Marquis  de  Conflans,  and  now  Bastille  besieger. 
Another  soldier  was  close  at  hand,  Arne — "Brave  Arne," 
Joseph  Arne,  only  twenty-six  years  old  ;  a  native  of  Dole 
in  Franche  Compte,  a  grenadier  of  the  company  of  Resu- 
velles,  and  a  good-looking,  impetuous,  soldierly  youth, 


1789.  ELI  AMD   HULIN.  643 

as  his  face  survives  to  us  in  portraits.  A  wine -mer- 
chant named  Cholat  was  near,  too,  playing  a  cannon- 
eer's part.  In  the  thick  of  the  press  was  an  active 
young  man  in  the  sober  suit  of  a  Chatelet  usher,  Stan- 
islas-Marie Maillard,  whose  fame  was  not  to  be  lim- 
ited, like  that  of  £li  and  of  Hulin,  to  the  one  brave 
day.  Marceau  was  here  beginning  his  "brief,  brave, 
and  glorious  "  career.  Herault  de  Sechelles,  the  young 
president  of  the  Paris  Parliament,  good-looking  and  gal- 
lant, the  son  of  a  gallant  soldier-sire,  was  in  the  hottest  of 
it  all.  Many  tales  have  grown  up  around  these  names,  or 
some  of  these  names.  It  is  hard  to  say,  in  this  siege  of  the 
Bastille,  what  is  legend  and  what  unadorned  truth.  It 
would  seem  as  if  we  had  to  abandon  the  highly  pictur- 
esque legend  of  Mademoiselle  de  Monsigny,  the  young, 
beautiful  girl  whom  the  mob  took  for  De  Launay's 
daughter,  and  incontinently  proposed  to  burn  there  and 
then  as  an  expiatory  victim  for  the  sins  of  the  father, 
and  who  was  only  rescued  by  the  bravery  of  Aubin 
Bonnemere,  while  the  real  father,  who  was  on  guard  in 
the  Bastille,  was  brought  to  the  parapet  by  his  daugh- 
ter's cries,  and  immediately  shot  dead.  Aubin  Bonne- 
mere  got  a  sabre  of  honor  in  1790,  but  it  is  said  that  this 
deed  of  his  is  very  doubtful. 

Through  the  crowd,  as  we  have  seen,  deputations 
made  from  time  to  time  their  way  with  drums  beating 
and  flags  of  truce.  One  of  these  deputations  came  from 
the  Hotel  de  Ville,  after  excited  individuals  had  come 
rushing  in  with  the  still  hot  grape-shot  from  the  fire  of 
De  Launay's  solitary  cannon.  It  called  upon  De  Launay 
solemnly,  by  order  of  the  permanent  committee  of  the 
Paris  militia,  to  allow  the  Bastille  to  be  occupied  by  the 
militia  in  common  with  his  own  troops,  who  were  from 
that  moment  to  be  under  the  civic  authority.  This  or- 


644  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

der  was  signed  by  De  Flesselles,  the  pale,  doomed  prov- 
ost, as  president  of  the  committee.  Luckless  De  Fles- 
selles, he  sat  in  the  grand  hall  of  Saint-Jean,  surrounded 
with  papers,  letters,  and  people  who  came,  the  envoys 
of  the  different  districts,  to  accuse  him  of  treachery  to 
his  face.  Through  all  the  din  he  still  strove  hard  to 
soothe  the  mob  with  affability,  to  face  calmly  the  ter- 
rors that  threatened  him.  Some  of  the  electors,  finding 
themselves  compromised  with  the  people,  turned  round 
and  attacked  him.  Dussaulx,  the  translator  of  Juvenal, 
and  Fauchet  endeavored  to  defend  him,  innocent  or 
guilty,  and  to  save  him  from  death.  Under  such  terri- 
ble conditions  did  he  try  to  give  orders  such  as  this 
which  was  now  carried  to  the  Bastille.  It  was  conveyed 
by  a  deputation  which  included  M.  de  la  Vigne,  presi- 
dent of  the  electors,  and  the  Abbe  Fauchet,  who  has 
left  on  record  a  glowing  account  of  the  attempt  to  get 
speech  with  De  Launay.  According  to  this  account  the 
deputation  tried  three  several  times  to  approach  and 
present  their  order ;  and  each  time  were  fired  upon  and 
forced  to  retire.  On  the  other  hand,  the  besieged  story 
is  that  the  deputation  were  called  upon  from  within  to 
come  forward,  that  they  hung  back  for  some  ten  min- 
utes in  the  Cour  de  1'Orme  without  venturing  forward, 
and  that  De  Launay  thereupon  declared  to  his  soldiers 
that  the  deputation  was  evidently  only  a  snare,  as  a 
genuine  deputation  would  not  have  hesitated  to  ap- 
proach. The  hesitation  of  the  deputies,  if  hesitation 
there  were,  was  due  no  doubt  to  the  cries  of  the  people 
behind  them  who  kept  shouting  to  them  to  beware  of 
the  treachery  of  the  governor.  It  is  easy  to  see  how 
between  besiegers  and  besieged,  each  desperately  sus- 
picious of  the  intended  treason  of  the  other,  any  chance 
of  coming  to  any  possible  understanding  was  exceed- 


H89.  WHAT  BANNER? 


645 


ingly  unlikely.  No  understanding  was  arrived  at,  and 
the  fight,  if  fight  it  can  be  called,  raved  along  its  course, 
leaving  in  its  wake  great  waves  of  excitement  that  ed- 
died back  to  the  Hotel  de  Ville  andpkept  all  there  in 
passion  and  panic. 

All  through  the  long  hours  the  fight  went  on,  panic 
and  passion  at  the  Hotel  de  Ville  sending  its  electric 
thrills  of  panic  and  passion  to  the  Bastille,  and  the  Bas- 
tille sending  back  its  electric  thrills  of  panic  and  passion 
to  the  Hotel  de  Ville.  The  pale  Provost  Flesselles  still 
kept  up  a  determined  air  of  patriotism,  although  patriot- 
ism at  large  was  growing  hourly  more  suspicious  of 
him.  "I  saw  him,"  says  Dussaulx,  "chewing  his  last 
mouthful  of  bread  ;  it  stuck  in  his  teeth,  and  he  kept  it 
in  his  mouth  two  hours  before  he  could  swallow  it." 
The  pale  Governor  de  Launay  grew  more  and  more  un- 
determined as  the  minutes  stretched  into  hours  and  no 
hint  came  of  Besenval's  promised  aid,  of  the  great  deeds 
that  the  Court  party  were  going  to  do.  Still  Saint- An- 
toine,  far  as  eye  could  reach,  was  black  with  raging  hu- 
manity, still  the  fearful  gaze  beheld  only  tossing  pikes 
and  the  light  on  musket  barrels  pointed  to  the  walls  as 
to  the  heavens,  and  almost  as  vainly,  and  vomiting  fire. 
Over  that  wild  welter  a  banner,  even  banners,  floated — 
mysterious  banners  which  have  puzzled  and  shall  puzzle 
historians  of  the  Bastille  doomsday  ever  since.  What 
was  the  banner,  what  were  the  banners,  used  on  that 
day  ?  Maillard  and  others  carried  flags  ;  but  these  may 
have  been  white  in  sign  of  pacific  intent.  They  cer- 
tainly were  not  red.  The  red  flag  was  then  only  the 
emblem  of  martial  law,  and  did  not  become  the  symbol 
of  revolution  till  1792.  Little  Saint- Antoine  seems  to 
have  carried  a  green  flag.  Republicanism  is  anxious  to 
prove  that  some  sort  of  banner  was  borne  on  that  great 


646  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

day  which  was  regarded  as  in  some  degree  a  national 
banner  ;  but  the  thing  seems  hard  to  prove.  It  is  more 
than  likely  that,  very  much  as  men  on  July  12  wandered 
about  Paris  with  $e  tilting  helmets  of  the  Valois  princes 
upon  their  heads,  and  the  swords,  perhaps,  of  Merovin- 
gian monarchs  in  their  hands  —  very  much  as  Georget 
from  Brest  handled  the  King  of  Siam's  cannon — so  the 
banners  that  flapped  on  the  wind  of  that  wild  fight  may 
have  been  royal  standards  of  all  hues  and  ages  conveni- 
ently lifted  from  wherever  patriotism  with  a  taste  for 
the  picturesque  could  lay  hands  upon  them.  Indeed,  in 
certain  of  the  engravings  which  represent  episodes  in 
this  new  Titanomachia  the  curious  may  discern  on  cer- 
tain of  the  banners  therein  displayed  signs  which  look 
exceedingly  like  the  insignia  of  royal  rule,  the  lilies  of 
the  Bourbon  line.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  patriot- 
ism had  on  July  14  sufficiently  formulated  its  existence, 
sufficiently  solidified  itself  to  be  ready  equipped  with  a 
patriotic  banner  all  complete.  Cockades,  indeed,  it  had 
got — whether  Flesselles  strove  to  amuse  it  with  such 
toys  or  no.  They  were  no  longer  the  green  cockades 
of  Cincinnalus  and  Camille  Desmoulins.  These  had 
been  dismissed  with  contumely  for  suggesting  the  green 
of  the  D'Artois  livery.  The  new  cockades  were  red, 
white,  and  blue.  Over  their  origin  authorities  have 
long  wrangled  and  shall  long  wrangle.  But  the  tri- 
color banner  had  hardly  sprung  into  existence  on  that 
day.  The  gules  and  argent  and  azure  of  its  heraldry 
did  not  vex  the  feverish  eyes  of  De  Launay,  looking  care- 
fully over  at  the  madness  with  a  method  in  it  beneath 
him.  It  was,  perhaps,  lucky  for  that  madness  with  a 
method  in  it  that  De  Launay  was  not  the  man  of  the 
whiff  of  grapeshot.  A  whiff  of  grapeshot,  a  succession 
of  whiffs  of  grapeshot,  would  have  held  the  Bastille  a 


1?89.  POWDER.  647 

little  longer  ;  would  have  beaten  back  Saint- Antoine  for 
the  time  being,  in  spite  of  those  cannon  that  the  Gardes 
Fran9aises  brought  up  and  trained  into  position  against 
the  Bastille  ;  might  have  altered  the  course  of  history. 
But  De  Launay  was  not  the  man  of  the  whiff  of  grape- 
shot. 

For  a  moment,  however,  it  seemed  as  if  De  Launay 
might  be  the  man  of  the  whiff  of  gunpowder.  He  had 
talked  big  before  to  Thuriot  de  la  Rosiere  about  what 
he  would  do  at  a  push  ;  he  would  blow  the  Bastille  and 
all  Saint-Antoine,  too,  into  the  July  heaven.  Now  in 
this  hour  of  gravest  pressure,  when  all  Paris  seemed  to 
be  raving  around  the  Bastille,  when  cannon  were  being 
brought  to  bear  upon  its  gates,  when  the  guard-house 
was  vanishing  in  a  sheet  of  flame  into  the  air,  and  the 
flame  was  being  briskly  fed  by  cartloads  of  straw  ;  when 
no  help  whatever  came  from  De  Besenval  on  the  other 
side  of  the  river,  or  from  those  courtly  legions  massed 
about  Versailles — why  then  it  seemed  to  De  Launay 
that  he  would  try  the  last,  that  he  would  be  as  good  as 
his  word,  and  do  his  best  to  blow  the  Bastille  and  its 
enemies  out  of  existence  together.  But  with  De  Lau- 
nay apparently  conception  and  execution  were  two 
widely  different  things.  He  caught  up  a  fuse  and  made 
for  the  powder-store  of  the  Sainte-Barbe.  But  there  a 
soldier,  Jacques  Ferrand,  who  did  not  share  the  heroic 
mood  of  the  governor,  met  him  with  the  point  of  the 
bayonet  and  kept  him  back.  One  may  imagine  that  a 
more  determined  man  would  not  have  been  so  kept 
back.  He  might  have  beaten  down  that  bayonet.  He 
might  have  found  a  pistol  somewhere  instead  of  that 
fuse.  He  might  have  either  shot  the  mutinous  soldier, 
or  shot  into  the  barrel  of  powder  nearest  to  him,  and 
so  carried  out  his  purpose,  and  caused  the  Bastille  to 


648  ME  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

disappear  on  the  wings  of  the  afternoon.  But  no. 
Balked  at  the  Sainte-Barbe  powder  -  store,  De  Launay, 
still  clutching  his  fuse,  ran  with  all  speed  to  the  Liberty 
Tower,  where  another  store  of  powder  was  kept.  There 
he  again  endeavored  to  fire  the  powder.  There  he  was 
prevented  again  by  soldier  Bequart,  who  by  doing  so 
saved  the  Bastille — for  some  few  days,  and  saved  his 
own  life  and  the  life  of  the  governor — for  some  few 
minutes.  Then  De  Launay  seems  to  have  given  up, 
and  the  end  approached.  The  discouraged  garrison 
were  determined  to  capitulate,  were  eager  to  escape 
with  their  lives  if  they  could  make  no  better  terms. 
They  tried  at  first  to  make  better  terms.  They  beat  a 
drum,  the  hoisted  a  white  flag  on  the  Tower  of  the  Basi- 
niere.  The  assailants  saw  only  new  treason  in  these 
signs  of  peace,  and  continued  furiously  to  advance,  fu- 
riously to  fire.  The  Swiss  officer  La  Flue,  speaking 
through  a  grating  by  the  drawbridge,  shrieked  for  per- 
mission to  be  allowed  to  march  out  with  the  honors  of 
war.  It  is  difficult  to  understand  how  any  human  voice 
could  be  heard,  no  matter  how  loudly  it  shouted,  over 
all  that  infernal  din.  But  the  Two  Friends  of  Liberty 
say  that  he  was  heard,  and  answered  with  savage  cries 
of  refusal.  Then  La  Flue,  after  a  pause  for  some  hur- 
ried writing  by  De  Launay,  held  out  through  the  aper- 
ture a  paper  and  cried  out  that  they  were  willing  to 
surrender  if  the  assailants  promised  not  to  massacre  the 
troops.  All  eyes  were  fixed  on  that  fluttering  piece  of 
paper,  all  minds  were  speculating  as  to  the  words  it 
might  contain.  But  between  that  paper  thrust  through 
the  grating  by  the  outstretched  hand  of  the  Swiss  officer, 
and  the  wild  mob  who  were  eager  to  read  it,  there  was 
truly  a  great  gulf  fixed.  The  deep  and  yawning  ditch 
of  the  moat  lay  between  assailants  and  assailed,  and 


1W9.  BRIDGING  THE   MOAT. 


640 


how  was  that  ditch  to  be  bridged  over?  An  unknown, 
courageous  individual  brought  a  plank,  which  was  laid 
on  the  parapet  and  stretched  across  the  ditch  to  within 
touch  of  the  drawbridge,  and  held  in  its  place  at  the 
other  end  by  the  weight  of  many  patriot  bodies.  Then 
the  unknown  courageous  individual  advanced  along  this 
perilous  bridge,  stretched  out  his  hand  for  the  paper, 
almost  had  it,  when  he  reeled,  either  because  he  lost  his 
balance,  or  struck  by  a  shot  from  above — or  perhaps 
behind,  for  the  assailants  were  reckless  in  their  shoot- 
ing— and  so  fell  into  the  ditch,  and  lay  there,  shattered. 
But  another  volunteer  for  the  perilous  plank  was  not 
wanting.  Stanislas-Marie  Maillard — or  was  it  La  Reole  ? 
for  accounts  differ  —  advanced  on  the  extemporized 
bridge.  We  see  him  in  a  picture  of  the  time,  poised 
over  the  dangerous  place  with  legs  well  stretched  out, 
with  sword  held  well  behind  him  in  his  left  hand,  per- 
haps for  balance,  with  right  hand  extended  to  seize  the 
offered  paper.  As  a  proof  of  the  difficulty  of  deciding 
any  point  in  this  perplexing  siege,  it  may  be  curious  to 
mention  that  M.  Gustave  Bord  in  his  "  Prise  de  la  Bas- 
tille," authoritatively  states  that  La  Reole  was  the  first 
to  attempt  the  plank  and  to  fall  into  the  ditch  ;  while 
M.  Georges  Lseocq  in  his  volume  says  that  there  is  no 
doubt  that  Maillard  was  the  man  to  make  the  first  at- 
tempt and  fail,  and  fall  into  the  fosse,  and  that  iSlie  was 
the  man  to  successfully  secure  the  paper  handed  out  by 
La  Flue.  After  all,  it  matters  very  little.  Maillard  or 
another  bore  back  the  paper,  gave  it  to  Elie  or  to  Hulin, 
who  read  it  aloud.  It  contained  these  words :  "  We 
have  twenty  tons  of  powder  ;  we  will  blow  up  the  gar- 
rison and  the  whole  quarter  if  you  do  not  accept  the 
capitulation."  "  We  accept  on  the  faith  of  an  officer," 
answered  Elie,  speaking  too  rashly — for  the  wild  world 


650  THE  FRENCH   REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLIV. 

behind  him  resented  all  idea  of  capitulation — "  lower 
your  bridge."  Perhaps  even  then  they  would  not  have 
obeyed  if  the  sight  of  three  cannon  levelled  at  the  large 
draw-bridge  had  not  prompted  their  decision.  The  small 
drawbridge  at  the  side  of  the  large  one  was  lowered, 
and  in  a  moment  was  leaped  upon  by  Elie,  Hulin,  Mail- 
lard,  La  Keole,  and  the  others,  who  bolted  it  down. 
The  Gardes  Fran9aises,  executing  a  dexterous  manoeuvre, 
formed  in  front  of  the  bridge,  and  prevented  the  wild 
mob  behind  from  flinging  themselves  into  the  ditch  and 
meeting  death  in  their  desire  to  crowd  on  to  the  narrow 
drawbridge.  The  door  behind  this  lower  drawbridge 
was  then  opened  by  an  Invalide,  who  seems  to  have 
asked  a  needlessly  foolish  question  as  to  what  Elie,  Hu- 
lin, and  the  others  wanted.  "  We  want  the  Bastille," 
was  the  natural  answer,  and  with  that  word  they  en- 
tered— and  took  it.  Immediately  they  rushed  to  the 
great  drawbridge  and  lowered  it,  Arne  leaping  on  it  to 
prevent  any  possible  attempt  to  raise  it  again.  It  was 
close  upon  six  o'clock  of  the  July  evening.  The  mob 
surged  in  ;  the  inevitable  hour  had  come  ;  the  Bastille 
was  taken. 

If  only  that  fair  triumph  had  been  quite  unstained  ! 
Still,  although  not  wholly  stainless,  it  remains  one  of 
the  greatest  triumphs  ever  won  in  the  name  of  liberty. 
A  hundred  years  have  come  and  gone  as  I  write.  It  is 
Sunday,  July  14,  1889.  The  summer  air  is  soft  with 
recent  rain,  the  late  summer  roses  hang  their  tinted 
heads,  a  faint  mist  clings  about  the  near  woods,  and  a 
gray  sky,  broken  with  hopeful  gleams  of  silver  light, 
canopies  the  companionable  river.  All  is  rest,  and 
peace,  and  beauty  in  this  fair  river  corner  of  the  world 
that  seems  almost  as  far  from  the  London  of  to-day  as 
from  the  Paris  of  this  day  one  hundred  years  ago,  when 


1789.  A  HUNDRED  YEARS  AGO.  651 

the  Bastille  and  all  that  the  Bastille  meant,  and  all  that 
the  Bastille  represented,  met  its  fate.  From  this  river- 
land  of  rosebush  and  poplar-tree,  of  greenest  grass  and 
silver  sky,  a  place  almost  as  fair  and  peaceful  as  the 
Earthly  Paradise  of  the  poet's  dream,  it  is  strangely 
fascinating,  strangely  surprising,  to  project  the  mind 
back  to  that  July  14,  just  one  century  ago,  when  Paris 
was  fierce  with  flame  and  red  with  blood,  and  hoarse 
with  strange  cries  of  triumph  and  revenge,  and  the 
grimmest  shadows  fell  over  the  darkling  Seine.  There 
would  be  less  peace  here  by  the  Thames,  or  yonder  by 
the  Seine,  or  indeed  by  any  river  in  the  world  to-day, 
were  it  not  for  the  deed  of  that  other  day,  that  day 
dead  a  hundred  years,  which  beat  down  the  barriers  of 
the  Bastille  and  gave  freedom  her  freshest  laurels. 


1HE  FRHXCII  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLV. 


CHAPTER  XLV. 

AFTEKMATH. 

IF  only  that  fair  triumph  had  been  quite  unstained  ! 
If  only  that  embracing  of  the  conquered  by  the  con- 
querors had  been  kept  up  !  If  only  there  had  been  no 
killing  of  Swiss,  no  killing  of  Invalides  !  One  Swiss 
was  killed  at  once  ;  one  luckless  Invalide  was  killed  at 
once  ;  it  was,  of  all  the  victims  that  passion-driven  mob 
could  have  chosen,  none  other  than  Bequart,  whose  hand 
held  back  De  Launay's  hand  from  firing  the  powder  at 
the  Liberty  Tower,  and  who  it  is  said  had  fired  no  single 
shot  during  that  wild  day.  The  hand  that  saved  the 
Bastille  and  saved  Saint- Antoine  was  savagely  hewn  off 
with  a  sabre-stroke  ;  Bequart's  body  was  pierced  with 
two  sword-thrusts  and  then  dragged  off  to  be  hanged 
with  another  victim,  Asselin,  at  the  Place  de  la  Greve, 
while  the  bleeding  hand  was  borne  aloft  and  ahead  in 
triumph.  The  masses  of  men  now  rushing  over  the 
Bastille  were  wild  beyond  control.  They  were  goaded, 
it  is  said,  by  some  last  shots  fired  from  the  higher  plat- 
forms by  soldiers  who  were  unaware  of  the  capitulation 
and  who  thought  themselves  still  free  to  carry  on  the 
fight.  The  firing  became  so  reckless  on  the  part  of  the 
victors  that  some  of  their  own  party  fell  victims  to  it. 
Humbert  was  wounded,  and  Arne  only  succeeded  in 
stopping  it  at  the  peril  of  his  life.  De  Launay,  conspic- 
uous in  his  gray  coat  and  red  ribbon,  formed  one  more 
valiant  determination  and  once  more  failed  to  carry  it 


1789.  WOE  TO   THE   CONQUERED.  (553 

out.  When  the  place  fell,  and  triumphant  Saint- An- 
toine  swarmed  into  it,  a  Roman  thought  seems  to  have 
struck  him,  and  he  attempted  to  kill  himself  with  the 
sword-blade  concealed  in  his  cane.  He  did  not  succeed 
in  this  any  more  than  he  had  succeeded  in  firing  the 
powder.  Maillard,  Cholat,  Arne,  and  many  another,  lynx- 
eyed,  strong-handed,  were  upon  him.  Arne  snatched 
the  sword-blade  away  from  De  Launay's  uncertain  hold. 
The  crowd  gathered  around  raving  at  him,  howling  for 
that  death  which  he  had  striven  to  inflict  upon  himself. 
Hulin,  Elie,  and  the  other  leaders  closed  around  him ; 
they  wished  to  keep  their  word  and  bring  him  away 
from  the  Bastille  in  safety.  But  it  was  easier  to  take 
the  Bastille  than  to  keep  De  Launay  alive.  Elie  might 
have  promised,  but  Saint-Antoine  had  not  promised, 
would  not  be  bound  by  any  promise.  Saint-Antoine 
wanted  De  Launay's  blood,  and  now  encircled  the  little 
knot  of  men  who  stood  around  De  Launay  endeavoring 
to  protect  him,  and  urging  with  pale,  earnest  faces  that 
the  prisoners  should  be  carried  to  the  Hotel  de  Ville  and 
duly  tried  there  for  their  offences  in  resisting  Saint-An- 
toine. With  the  greatest  difficulty,  iSlie,  Hulin,  Arne, 
Maillard,  and  the  others  got  De  Launay  out  of  the  Bas- 
tille. Saint-Antoine  was  snatching  at  him  with  its  hun- 
dred hands,  pouring  imprecations  upon  him  from  its 
hundred  throats.  Saint-Antoine  wanted  De  Launay's 
blood  and  meant  to  have  it.  Already  it  had  dragged, 
nearly  dead,  poor  Registrar  Clouet,  captured  near  the 
Saltpetre  Arsenal,  to  the  Hotel  de  Ville.  Clouet's  blue- 
and-gold  uniform  had  made  him  seem  suspiciously  like 
Governor  de  Launay  to  insurgent  patriotism.  He  was 
with  difficulty  released  from  their  reluctant  hands  on 
the  assurance  of  the  committee  that  Clouet  was  not  De 
Launay,  and  by  the  determined  courage  of  the  Mar- 


654  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLV. 

quis  de  la  Salle  and  the  Chevalier  de  Saudiy.  De  Lau- 
nay's thin  face,  sharp  nose,  wrinkled  forehead,  furrowed 
cheeks,  sunken  eyes,  and  hard  mouth  were  the  centre 
of  attraction  for  all  that  furious  crowd.  In  vain  the  un- 
happy man,  with  the  terrors  of  death  upon  him,  pleaded 
to  Hulin,  pleaded  to  Elie,  for  the  protection  they  had 
promised.  They  had  promised  and  they  did  their  best 
to  perform,  but  they  could  not  perform  the  impossible. 
The  wrath  of  the  mob  began  to  extend  from  De  Launay 
to  his  protectors.  One,  L'Epine,  was  struck  down,  was 
nearly  killed.  Hulin  observed  that  the  mob  seemed 
only  to  know  De  Launay  by  the  fact  that  he  was  bare- 
headed. He  conceived  the  heroic  idea  of  putting  his 
own  hat  upon  De  Launay's  head  ;  and  from  that  mo- 
ment he  received  the  blows  intended  for  the  governor. 
The  royalist  tradition  of  which  M.  Ch.  d'Hericault  is 
chief  champion,  insists,  perhaps  with  truth,  that  De 
Launay,  still  more  heroic  than  Hulin,  gave  him  his  hat 
back  again,  wishing  rather  to  die  than  endanger  him. 
At  last  Hulin,  in  spite  of  his  great  strength,  was  forced 
aside  at  the  Place  de  la  Greve.  Then  Saint-Antoine 
closed  upon  its  victim.  The  last  words  of  De  Launay 
as  his  murderers  fell  upon  him  stabbing  and  striking 
was,  "  Friends,  kill  me  quickly,  do  not  let  me  languish." 
They  did  kill  him  quickly.  His  head  was  swiftly  hewn 
off  and  held  aloft  on  the  point  of  a  pike.  This  was  the 
first  time  of  the  many  times  that  heads  were  so  sti'icken 
off  and  carried  on  pike-point  through  Paris.  Every  one 
knows  or  should  know  the  ghastly  sketch  by  Girodet  of 
De  Launay's  head  on  the  pike,  with  its  grim  expression 
of  startled  horror.  That  expression  of  startled  horror  on 
dead  uplifted  faces  soon  became  familiar  enough  to  Paris- 
ian eyes.  A  fearful  fashion  had  been  set.  De  Launay 
had  a  companion  in  his  death  in  a  far  better  man  than 


1789.  SAINT-ANTOINE   CONQUERS.  655 

himself,  Major  de  Losrae-Salbray,  who  had  always  been 
exceedingly  gentle  to  the  Bastille  prisoners,  and  whom 
now,  at  the  Place  de  la  Greve,  Saint- Antoine  began  to  kill. 
The  young  Marquis  de  Pelleport,  who  had  known  five 
years'  imprisonment  in  the  Bastille  for  libels  written  in 
England,  made  a  determined  effort  to  save  De  Losme 
and  came  very  near  to  sharing  his  fate.  De  LosmeV 
head  was  cut  off  and  thrust,  too,  upon  a  pike.  Of  the 
other  prisoners,  De  Miray  was  killed  in  the  Rue  des 
Tournelles,  and  M.  de  Persan,  lieutenant  of  the  Invalides, 
by  the  Port  au  Ble.  As  for  the  rank  and  file,  the  smock- 
frocks  of  the  Swiss  led  the  mob  to  think  that  they  were 
prisoners,  and  so  saved  them  from  the  first  fury  of  the 
attack.  The  Invalides  came  very  near  to  perishing  to  a 
man.  But  the  Gardes  Francaises  protected  them,  suc- 
ceeded in  shielding  them  and  carrying  them  off  to  bar- 
racks. The  murders  could  not  be  prevented,  but  the 
wholesale  massacre  of  the  Bastille  defenders  was  averted. 
But  the  vengeance  of  Saint-Antoine  was  not  sated. 
All  through  the  day  it  had  been  nursing  its  wrath 
against  De  Flesselles,  till  that  wrath  had  swollen  to 
blood-madness.  Was  it  not  said  now  by  De  Flesselles' 
enemies  that  a  letter  from  the  provost  had  been  found 
in  the  pockets  of  the  dead  De  Launay,  and  did  not  that 
letter  bid  him  hold  good  and  hope  for  succor  till  even, 
while  he,  De  Flesselles,  amused  the  Parisians  with  cock- 
ades and  promises?  Saint-Antoine  had  got  its  hand  in 
at  killing  now.  Raging,  with  the  heads  and  hands  of 
the  Bastille  victims  on  pikes,  it  foamed  now  into  the 
Hotel  de  Ville,  where  Flesselles  sat,  pale,  patient,  and 
weary,  and  shouted  wild  accusations,  wild  condemnations 
at  him.  De  Flesselles  behaved  composedly.  "Since 
my  fellow-citizens  suspect  me,"  he  said,  "I  will  with- 
draw." Saint  Antoine  yelled  to  him  to  go  to  the  Palais 


656  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLV. 

Royal.  "Very  well,  sirs,"  he  answered,  quietly,  "let 
us  go  to  the  Palais  Royal."  His  composure  seems  to 
have  impressed  the  crowd,  for  though  they  pressed 
about  him  as  he  descended  the  stair,  they  followed  him 
without  doing  him  any  harm  across  the  Place  de  la 
Greve.  He  might  even  have  got  off,  but  a  young  man 
'  suddenly  sprang  forward,  presented  a  pistol  at  him  with 
the  words,  "  Traitor,  you  shall  go  no  farther !"  fired,  and 
shot  him  dead.  Then  Saint- Antoine  swooped  upon  the 
prone  body  and  hewed  off  its  head,  which  in  another 
moment  was  lifted  high  on  a  pike-point  by  the  side  of 
the  head  of  De  Launay.  So  through  the  Paris  streets 
those  ghastly  trophies  were  paraded  in  terrifying  pro- 
cession, with  the  beatings  of  drums,  the  shouting  of 
strange  cries,  the  waving  of  banners.  Patriotism  was 
awake,  and  was  doing  grim  work. 

A  more  agreeable  procession  was  formed  a  little  later, 
when  the  prisoners  in  the  Bastille,  who  had  been  forgot- 
ten in  the  first  wild  excitement  of  victory,  were  un- 
earthed, set  free,  and  escorted  in  triumph  through  the 
streets.  The  actual  number  of  prisoners  did  not  keep 
up  the  popular  character  of  the  Bastille  for  horrors. 
Only  seven  prisoners  were  found  in  the  dungeons. 
Four  of  these  were  imprisoned  as  forgers.  Another, 
the  Count  de  Solages,  was  imprisoned  by  his  father's 
wish  to  curb  his  riotousness  and  extravagance.  The 
two  others  were  old  men  who  had  gone  mad  in  prison, 
and  had  been  kept  in  prison  because  the  authorities  did 
not  very  well  know  what  else  to  do  with  them.  One 
was  Tavernier,  natural  son  of  Paris-Duvernay,  who  had 
been  in  the  prison  since  1759.  The  other  was  James 
Francis  Xavier  Whyte,  who  had  been  incarcerated  for 
mental  derangement  since  1781.  These  two  prisoners 
were  afterwards  placed  in  the  Charenton  madhouse. 


EEVEILLON.  65f 

The  seven  prisoners  were  solemnly  conducted  from 
the  Bastille  to  the  house  of  Santerre,  where  the  wound- 
ed brewer  entertained  them  sumptuously.  Then  they 
were  led  along  the  Hue  Saint-Antoine  to  the  Palais 
Royal  by  the  Gardes  Fran9aises,  with  drums  beating 
and  banners  waving.  An  excited  populace  thronged 
eagerly  to  behold  these  victims  of  tyranny,  and  might 
perhaps  have  crushed  them  to  death  in  their  sympa- 
thetic enthusiasm  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  butt-ends 
of  the  escort's  muskets.  One  person  we  might  have  ex- 
pected to  find  among  the  occupants,  but  history,  so  far 
as  we  have  searched,  yields  no  trace  of  him.  Reveillon 
the  paper-manufacturer  the  unwilling  hero  of  the  famous 
riot  which  had  proved  so  momentous  in  its  consequences, 
had  fled  for  safety  to  the  Bastille,  and  therein  vanished 
from  knowledge.  Mr.  Stephens,  in  his  account  of  the 
Bastille  on  the  morning  of  July  14,  says,  "At  present 
it  contained  but  seven  prisoners,  together  with  poor 
Reveillon,  the  paper-manufacturer;"  but  he  forgets  all 
about  poor  Reveillon  when  he  comes  to  the  release  of 
the  prisoners,  and  I  have  striven  in  vain  to  find  any 
trace  of  him.  It  does  not  seem  likely  that,  if  he  had 
been  in  the  Bastille  at  the  time  of  its  capture,  his  name 
would  have  escaped  public  notice.  Wherever  he  was, 
he  certainly  has  vanished  from  knowledge.  There 
were  more  important  matters  going  than  the  fate  of  a 
paper-manufacturer,  and  yet  it  is  curious  that,  consider- 
ing how  inevitably  his  name  will  be  associated  with  the 
early  hours  of  the  Revolution,  it  is  seemingly  impossi- 
ble to  follow  his  fortunes  farther  than  the  threshold  of 
the  Bastille. 

The  news  of  the  liberation  of  the  Bastille  prisoners 
soon  spread  to  the  other  prisons,  and  prompted  a  keen 
desire  for  like  liberty  in  the  breasts  of  the  inmates, 
I.— 42 


658  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLV. 

The  poor  prisoners  imprisoned  for  debt  at  La  Force  and 
the  Chatelet  broke  out,  took  the  key  of  the  fields,  and 
rejoiced  to  find  themselves  free.  Among  them  was  an 
Irish  peer,  the  Earl  of  Massareene,  who  had  been  nine- 
teen years  a  prisoner.  Irish  peers  had  a  way  of  turning 
up  in  the  most  unexpected  places — witness  that  pair, 
father  and  son,  who  were  slaves  to  the  barbarous  Turk, 
and  played  their  curious  part  in  the  history  of  Morocco. 
But  no  one  perhaps  is  hero  of  a  stranger  story  than  this 
indebted  gentleman,  who  passed  his  life  very  pleasantly 
within  the  four  walls  of  a  jail  and  who  owed  his  liberty 
at  last  to  a  revolution.  The  mighty  cause  that  threw 
down  the  Bastille  and  destroyed  the  Old  Order  prompted 
Lord  Massareene  to  force  his  way  out  of  his  prison  at 
the  head  of  his  fellow-prisoners.  So  the  wind  that  up- 
roots the  oak  may  release  the  acorn. 

Paris,  as  a  whole,  did  not  disgrace  itself  on  the  night 
of  July  14.  The  murders,  horrible  as  they  were,  were 
but  the  work  of  a  few  persons,  and  were  regarded  at 
the  time,  rightly  or  wrongly,  as  the  acts  of  a  wild  jus- 
tice. But  there  was  practically  no  pillaging,  no  dis- 
order, no  repetition  of  the  unworthy  acts  of  July  12. 
The  great  city  had  done  a  great  work,  and  was  perhaps 
calmer  in  its  victory  than  it  had  been  in  its  expectation. 
It  had  had  its  victims  and  its  martyrs;  it  had  its  heroes. 
It  had  £lie,  with  his  battered  sword.  It  had  sleepless 
Moreau  de  Saint-Mery.  It  had  Fauchet,  and  Marceau, 
and  Hulin,  and  many  another  man.  These  were  unlike  in 
all  things  else,  but  alike  in  their  determination  to  keep 
for  the  people  the  Paris  they  had  won.  The  Parisians 
showed  a  determination  worthy  of  their  leaders.  In 
the  full  flush  of  victory  they  did  not  forget  prudence. 
An  attack  seemed  inevitable.  They  prepared  to  receive 
it.  Every  one  helped  in  the  task  of  protecting  the  town. 


1789.  PARIS  READY  TO  RESIST  ATTACK.  659 

Barricades  were  made,  entrenchments  dug,  weapons  dis- 
tributed. The  militia  kept  watch  and  ward.  The  night 
of  victory  was  passed  under  arms.  Paris  was  ready  to 
face  the  uttermost. 


660         THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.      CH.  XLVI. 


CHAPTER  XLVI. 

THE   STONES    OF   THE   BASTILLE. 

So  the  Bastille  stands,  much  as  it  stood  once  before 
now,  four  centuries  ago,  gaunt,  gutted,  the  imperfect 
shell  of  a  prison-house.  Then,  those  four  centuries 
earlier,  busy  Parisian  hands  laid  stone  upon  stone  with 
infinite  care,  thinking  to  build  till  doomsday.  Now  busy 
Parisian  hands  were  pulling  stone  from  stone  in  fierce 
impatience.  Poor  Aubriot,  who  was  kind  to  Jews  and 
Jewesses,  if  his  ghost  might  revisit  the  glimpses  of  the 
waning  July  moon,  would  think  that  doomsday  had  in- 
deed come.  So  it  had  in  a  sense,  the  doomsday  of  that 
whole  system  which  Aubriot  thought  as  enduring  as 
the  firmament.  Paris,  waking  up  next  morning  and 
staring  at  the  abandoned  walls,  knew  its  strength  at  last. 
It  is  impossible,  perhaps  unprofitable,  to  speculate  upon 
what  might  have  happened  if  De  Launay  had  surren- 
dered at  once,  and  if  the  first  heralds  of  insurgent  Saint- 
Antoine  had  been  permitted  to  walk  their  free  way 
through  its  corridors  and  lay  their  patriotic  hands  upon 
whatever  weapons  they  could  find.  Perhaps  the  lease 
of  life  of  the  house  of  Capet  might  have  been  a  little  fur- 
ther prolonged.  But  with  that  desperate  struggle,  that 
wild,  astonishing  triumph,  the  sudden  conquest  of  the  long 
unconquerable,  the  rising  revolution  received  the  revela- 
tion of  its  power.  The  Bastille  was  an  unimportant  place 
enough.  But  being  taken,  and  taken  in  such  a  way,  it  be- 
came the  symbol  and  the  inspiration  of  a  new  world. 


H89.  PRECIOUS  RELICS. 


661 


A  contemporary  writer  declares  that  if  the  towers  of 
this  edifice,  of  which  there  were  many,  had  been  giants, 
instead  of  inanimate  masses  of  mortar  and  stone,  they 
could  not  have  more  effectually  kept  alive  the  indigna- 
tion of  the  people  against  them.  The  mob  appeared  to 
be  resolved  not  to  allow  one  particle  to  stand  beside  an- 
other. That  such  may  be  the  fate  of  all  similar  burying- 
places  for  living  virtue  must,  says  the  observer  piously, 
be  the  wish  of  every  man  who  is  not  a  monster  at  heart. 
A  piece  of  one  of  the  stones  of  this  so  detestably  cele- 
brated building  soon  became  scarce.  Every  one  gath- 
ered what  he  could,  and  converted  it  into  tablets  and 
ornaments.  Even  rings  and  ciphers  were  engraved  from 
pieces,  and  made  into  patriotic  presents.  That  which  a 
short  time  before  had  been  hideous  to  look  on,  now  w  as 
esteemed  as  a  precious  relic.  In  this  form,  the  philos- 
opher meditates,  the  traditional  history  of  the  disgrace- 
ful and  abject  condition  of  man  in  the  eighteenth  century 
will  be  best  handed  down  to  future  ages.  It  is  said  that, 
on  the  morrow  after  the  taking  of  the  Bastille,  the  crowds 
of  people  which  came  from  all  parts  to  see  it  were  so 
great  that  five  hundred  of  the  militia  could  not  keep 
them  at  a  distance  while  the  walls  were  being  thrown 
down.  Everything  that  could  be  found  in  the  doomed 
prison-house,  from  rusty  iron  chains  to  mouldering  ar- 
chives, was  eagerly  dragged  into  the  daylight,  sub- 
jected to  an  eager  scrutiny. 

One  hundred  times  since  that  day  has  the  fourteenth 
of  July  come  round  again  ;  one  hundred  times  the  civ- 
ilized world  has  had  good  reason  to  rejoice  that  a  Pa- 
risian mob  stormed  and  destroyed  a  worthless  fortress. 
As  we  look  back  over  the  lapsed  century,  we  can  see 
that  with  the  passage  of  every  year  the  importance  and 
the  dignity  of  the  taking  of  the  Bastille  has  grown  and 


662  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION1.  CH.  XLVI. 

strengthened.  Men  have  not  been  wanting,  we  have 
seen,  who  try  to  minimize  its  importance,  to  diminish 
its  historic  dignity.  They  urge  that  the  Bastille,  at  the 
time  of  its  fall,  was  a  place  of  no  importance.  They 
say  that  it  had  ceased  to  be  the  terror-house  of  political 
prisoners.  They  maintain  that  it  was  not,  in  any  mili- 
tary sense,  taken  at  all.  They  protest  that  the  whole 
episode  was  an  absurd  blunder  which  attached  to  the 
Bastille  an  importance  that  it  had  long  outdated,  and 
which  gave  its  captors  a  burlesque  air  of  pseudo-hero- 
ism. They  even  assert  that  it  was  a  crime,  the  herald 
of  a  long  catalogue  of  crimes.  There  is  little  or  noth- 
ing to  be  said  for  such  arguments.  It  was  not  the 
captors  of  the  Bastille  who  were  responsible  for  the 
blunders  and  the  bloodshed  of  the  Revolution.  It  was 
the  condition  of  things  which  made  the  capture  of  the 
Bastille  so  momentous.  The  very  fact  that  at  the  time 
people  of  all  parties  thought  its  fall  so  momentous  is 
enough  to  prove  the  case.  Even  if  the  Bastille  itself 
had  ceased  to  terrify,  it  still  represented  the  old,  ter- 
rific idea.  It  was  a  very  strong  argument  in  stone  in 
favor  of  the  feudal  system,  and  all  that  the  feudal  sys- 
tem meant.  It  had  long  been  the  dread  and  the  curse  of 
Paris,  the  merciless  answer  to  all  freedom  of  thought, 
of  word,  of  deed.  If  the  first  wave  of  the  rising  tide 
of  democracy  beat  against  it  and  overwhelmed  it,  it 
was  not  for  nothing.  Its  mighty  keep,  its  eight  porten- 
tous towers,  were  the  solid,  visible  presentment  of  all 
that  was  worse  in  the  Old  Order  of  things.  It  was  a 
symbol,  and  symbols  are  the  most  potent  influences  in 
the  struggles  of  political  forces.  But  it  was  not  merely 
a  symbol.  It  still  held  prisoners  ;  it  was  still  ready  to 
hold  prisoners  ;  its  guns  were  a  standing  menace  to 
Paris.  If  we  were  to  imagine  a  London  mob  of  to-day 


1789.  THE  BASTILLE  KEY.  ggg 

besieging  the  Tower  of  London,  the  event  would  cer- 
tainly have  little  historic  dignity  or  importance.  Long 
generations  have  gone  by  since  the  Tower  of  London 
represented  any  despotic  system,  or  had  any  political 
significance  or  symbolism  whatever.  But  every  man 
who  attacked  that  Bastille  upon  that  midsummer  day, 
one  hundred  years  ago,  looked  upon  the  Bastille  as  the 
petrifaction  of  the  Old  Order  and  the  old  despotism. 
The  youngest  could  remember  how  it  had  been  used  for 
the  basest  political  purposes,  how  it  had  been  employed 
to  stifle  freedom.  It  was  hated,  it  was  justly  hated  ; 
it  was  natural  and  significant  that  the  first  popular 
stroke  should  be  levelled  against  it  ;  its  fall  is  an  event 
of  moment  in  the  history  of  man,  a  day  of  thanksgiv- 
ing in  the  history  of  civilization. 

The  first  fury  of  popular  success  conceived  of  nothing 
better  to  do  with  the  Bastille  than  to  destroy  it  utterly, 
to  blow  it  as  far  as  possible  from  the  face  of  the  earth.  It 
would  send  its  key  across  the  Atlantic  to  Washington 
to  lie  on  his  table  at  Mount  Vernon.  It  would  destroy 
all  the  rest.  The  thought  was  not  unhappy  if  it  had 
been  but  confined  to  the  mere  bricks  and  mortar  of  the 
famous  keep  and  eight  terrible  towers.  But  this  was 
not  so.  General  de  Gribeauval  had  collected  together 
within  the  walls  of  the  Bastille  quite  a  little  museum 
of  models,  and  of  objects  connected  with  sling  instru- 
ments of  war.  The  luckless  Gribeauval  collection  was 
scarcely  likely  to  be  sacred  in  the  eyes  of  irritable  Pa- 
risians seeking  arms.  Whatever  was 'serviceable,  what- 
ever was  weaponable  among  the  specimens  of  an  an- 
tique warfare,  was  seized  upon  eagerly  and  converted 
to  new  uses.  The  rest  was  pulled  apart,  scattered 
abroad,  thrown  aside,  dispersed,  a  mere  wreck,  the  de- 
spair of  military  archaeologists.  Unhappily,  too,  patri- 


664  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLV1 

otism,  inspired  by  a  kind  of  Omar-like  passion,  con- 
ceived the  idea  that  the  archives  of  the  Bastille,  all  the 
vast  mass  of  papers  it  contained,  were  as  detestable  as 
the  rest,  and  as  deserving  of  destruction.  The  ground 
about  the  Bastille  was  littered  for  days  with  a  wealth 
of  documents.  Much  of  the  mass  was  wantonly  de- 
stroyed ;  much  went  into  the  prudent  hands  of  the 
butterman  and  the  trunk-maker.  A  small  part  was 
rescued  by  collectors.  Some  portion  went  to  Russia. 
Some  portion  of  it  passed  into  the  hands  of  the  State, 
which  suddenly  awoke  to  the  importance  of  these  pa- 
pers before  it  was  all  too  late.  These  have  since,  in 
various  ways,  at  least,  seen  the  light.  Beaumarchais, 
like  the  adventurous,  intelligent  man  he  was,  guessed 
that  there  were  good  gleanings  to  be  gathered  from  this 
harvest  of  flying  paper,  and  laid  burglarious  hands  on  a 
considerable  quantity.  Either  less  fortunate  envy  or  purer 
patriotism,  however,  noted  and  denounced  him,  and 
Beaumarchais  had,  somewhat  reluctantly,  to  disgorge 
his  treasure,  which,  as  he  gracefully  explained,  he  had 
gathered  from  under  the  feet  of  the  people  on  July  15, 
while  he  was  visiting  the  Bastille  at  the  head  of  a  party 
of  armed  men. 

If  it  is  hard  to  forgive  the  destruction  of  so  much 
precious  historical  matter,  it  is  easier  to  forgive  and 
easy  to  understand  the  spirit  which  prompted  the  total 
annihilation  of  the  Bastille  itself.  On  July  16  it  was 
decided  by  the  Assembly  of  Electors  that  the  building 
should  be  obliterated,  and  a  committee  was  formed  to 
see  that  the  determination  was  carried  out.  The  com- 
mittee found  a  zealous  and  a  faithful  servant  in  the 
patriot  Palloy.  Out  of  the  ruins  of  the  Bastille  a  cu- 
rious figure  rises,  the  figure  of  the  patriot  Palloy.  The 
patriot  Palloy,  who  weathered  the  Revolution  better 


PALLOY.  665 

than  many  a  better  man,  was,  at  the  time  of  the  taking 
of  the  Bastille,  a  master  mason  of  some  five-and-thirty 
years.  He  had  prospered  and  made  money  by  his  trade. 
He  was  associated  with  the  royal  hunting  buildings. 
He  had  always  a  keen  eye  to  the  main  chance,  and  a 
kind  of  half-humorous,  half-buffoon  insight  into  the 
popular  temper  which  guided  him  with  sufficient  shrewd- 
ness to  serve  his  turn.  He  took  a  part  in  the  .attack 
upon  the  Bastille,  but  his  real  attack  was  reserved  for 
the  days  succeeding  its  fall.  Under  the  directions  of 
the  committee  of  demolition  he  fell  upon  the  Bastille 
at  the  head  of  a  large  body  of  workmen,  and  set  to 
work  with  a  will.  His  quick  and  crafty  wit  saw  a  way 
of  turning  the  Bastille  to  good  account.  It  was  not 
enough  for  him,  he  said,  merely  to  throw  down  the  walls 
of  the  hated  fortress,  he  wished  to  perpetuate  the  hor- 
ror of  its  memory.  So  he  set  to  work  at  once  to  turn 
every  possible  fragment  of  the  Bastille  to  ingenious 
account.  Out  of  its  stones  he  constructed  eighty-three 
little  models  of  the  Bastille,  which  he  sent,  one  each,  to 
each  of  eighty-three  departments.  What,  we  may  won- 
der, have  become  of  all  of  those  eighty-three  miniature 
Bastilles  now?  Some  are  lodged  securely  in  local  mu- 
seums. With  the  bars  and  bolts  he  fabricated  swords, 
and  struck  any  quantity  of  medals.  Every  dismembered 
morsel  of  the  Bastille  was  turned  to  account  to  make 
statuettes  of  Liberty,  patriotic  busts,  snuff-boxes,  paper- 
weights, and  all  manner  of  toys  and  trinkets  for  true  pa- 
triotism to  wear  around  its  neck  or  at  its  watch-chain. 
It  became  promptly  the  fashionable  thing  to  carry  some 
souvenir  of  the  Bastille  on  one's  person,  thanks  to  the 
enterprise  of  Palloy,  and  the  patronage  of  the  Orleanist 
princes  who  set  the  example.  The  larger  stones  were 
employed,  many  of  them,  to  help  in  the  construction  of 
the  Bridge  of  the  Revolution,  that  the  people  of  Paris 


666  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XL VI. 

might  forever  tread  beneath  their  feet  the  stones  of  the 
hated  building.  Even  private  individuals  had  stair- 
cases constructed  of  the  same  materials  and  for  the  same 
patriotic  purpose.  Perhaps  the  grimmest  fact  in  con- 
nection with  all  this  wholesale  distribution  of  the  Bas- 
tille was  the  present  which  Palloy  made  to  the  Dauphin 
of  a  set  of  dominoes  which  had  been  made  from  the 
marble  of  the  chimney  of  the  governor  of  the  Bastille. 
Rumor  has  inaccurately  reported  that  the  dominoes 
were  constructed  from  the  bones  of  prisoners  found  in 
the  Bastille.  Jt  does  not  need  that  additional  touch  to 
make  the  thing  more  tragic.  It  is  infinitely,  ironically 
pathetic  to  think  of  the  poor  little  lad  playing,  or  being 
asked  to  play,  with  the  fragments  of  the  great  fortress 
which  had  for  so  long  represented  the  power  and  terror 
of  his  race,  and  which  now,  reduced  to  a  mass  of  trink- 
ets and  rubbish,  was  but  the  helpless  herald  of  his  own 
destruction  and  the  destruction  of  his  house.  That  the 
king,  Louis  XVI.  himself,  should  have  accepted  and 
made  use  of  a  Bastille  paper-weight  with  his  own  por- 
trait engraved  thereon,  which  was  presented  to  him,  is 
less  pathetic  and  not  at  all  surprising. 

Palloy  was  consumed  by  a  very  high  sense  of  his  own 
importance.  He  organized  the  workmen  under  his  con- 
trol into  a  kind  of  solemn  and  apostolic  guild;  he  called 
the  emissaries  whom  he  despatched  with  the  models  of 
the  Bastille  to  the  different  departments,  Apostles  of 
Liberty.  Palloy  and  his  workmen  were  bound  together 
by  solemn  oaths  of  fidelity  and  mutual  assistance,  and 
their  organization  held  together  for  some  years,  and 
figured  often  in  connection  with  the  conquerors  of  the 
Bastille,  who  formed  a  sort  of  armed  and  official  corpo- 
ration, in  many  ceremonies  and  functions  of  the  early 
revolutionary  years.  When  the  Bastille  was  finally 
made  up  into  models  and  medals,  Palloy's  fertile  mind 


1789.  PALLOY   THE   WEATHERCOCK.  667 

conceived  the  notion  of  a  column  to  stand  upon  its  site. 
But  that  conception  was  not  destined  to  be  carried  out 
for  many  a  long  year — not  until  the  reign  of  Louis  Phi- 
lippe, when  the  absurd  plaster  elephant  which  Napoleon 
set  up,  and  in  which  Victo.r  Hugo's  Gavroche  used  to 
hide,  was  in  its  turn  abolished. 

Palloy  himself,  as  we  have  said,  weathered  the  Revo- 
lution and  many  rules  besides,  but  we  may  part  company 
with  him  here,  after  casting  a  prophetic  glance  over  his 
grotesque  career.  He  proved  to  be  the  most  perfect 
French  parallel  to  our  illustrious  Vicar  of  Bray.  To 
him  whatever  was,  in  the  way  of  government,  was  right. 
A  fairly  good  craftsman,  a  wretched  writer  and  rhymer, 
he  employed  his  talents  and  his  half-crazy  wits  in  turn 
for  the  benefit  of  every  party.  At  first  a  constitutional 
Royalist,  he  took  the  revolutionary  fever  in  all  its  va- 
rious stages,  and  became  in  turn  Girondist,  Montagnard, 
Hebertist,  a  devotee  of  Thermidor,  a  follower  of  Robes- 
pierre, a  partisan  of  the  Directory.  The  moment  Napo- 
leon came  to  power  our  Palloy  became  a  furious  Bona- 
partist,  but  his  fury  faded  with  the  return  of  the 
Bourbons,  and  the  loyal  royalism  which  had  long  lain 
dormant  reasserted  itself.  Forgetting  the  clumsy  cari- 
catures with  which  he  had  insulted  the  agony  of  Louis 
XVI.  and  Marie  Antoinette,  he  took  to  writing  Royalist 
songs  of  a  sufficiently  ridiculous  and  despicable  nature ; 
but  he  veered  again  to  zealous  Orleanism  the  moment 
that  Louis  Philippe  came  to  the  throne.  He  died  at 
last  in  1835,  the  weathercock  of  that  wild  period,  the 
picture  in  little  of  every  successive  phase  of  the  politi- 
cal events  of  his  life.  It  may  be  fairly  said  that  the 
Revolution  did  not  produce  a  more  ridiculous  figure. 
His  tergiversations,  his  impudence,  his  crack-brained 
self-conceit  rank  him  at  least  among  the  most  remark- 
able caricatures  of  history. 


668  THE  FRENCH  REVOLUTION.  CH.  XLVI. 

Palloy's  mean,  foolish,  cunning  countenance  may  still 
be  familiar  to  the  curious  in  the  engravings  of  the  day. 
That  porcine  face  grinned  its  pitiful  approval  of  all 
powers  that  be  ;  those  fish-shaped  eyes  saw  with  servile 
indifference  so  many  good  and  gallant  things  go  down 
into  the  dust.  A  fulsome  epigram  composed  or  prompt- 
ed by  himself,  and  inscribed  at  the  foot  of  his  likeness, 
informed  the  world  that  a  future  age,  impressed  by  the 
greatness  of  this  good  man,  would  confuse  the  word 
"patriot"  with  the  word  "Palloy."  Well,  the  term 
patriot  has  remained  with  Palloy,  remained  as  the  most 
curious  brand  of  ignominy  that  could  well  be  attached 
to  his  despicable  name. 

Such  as  he  was,  he  helped  to  set  the  fashion  of  what 
may  be  called  "  Bastillism."  His  little  effigies,  con- 
structed from  the  veritable  stone  of  the  Bastille,  were 
the  precursors  of  all  manner  of  miniature  Bastilles. 
Ingenious  potters,  commended  by  Camille  Desmoulins, 
devised  large  stoves  in  the  shape  of  the  Bastille,  where- 
with to  warm  the  feet  of  deputies  in  the  Convention. 
These  served  the  double  purpose  of  keeping  the  actual 
temperature  comfortable,  and  feeding  by  the  sight  of 
their  significant  shape  the  patriotic  hearts  within  the 
legislative  bosoms.  Plates  were  fabricated  represent- 
ing, more  or  less  ably  according  to  the  capacity  of  the 
artist,  the  taking  of  the  Bastille.  It  was  quite  a  glo- 
rious thing  to  eat  one's  food  off  a  platter  which  served 
to  perpetuate  such  memories  and  inspire  such  heroic 
aspirations.  Those  plates  were  common  enough  then, 
but  the  Bastille  has  been  re-destroyed  time  and  time 
again  in  their  destruction,  and  specimens  of  them  are 
worth  their  weight  in  gold  now.  Which  thing  is  also 
a  sermon. 

END    OF    THE    FIRST    VOLUME. 


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